Cathy Lomax and Alex Michon are haunted by the art and socio-political British culture (and disappointed by the omissions) in The Horror Show! at Somerset House.
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| Leigh Bowery, Hooded Cape Ensemble, 1988 |
In the week in which the death of Terry Hall of The Specials was announced, we went off to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House. Billed as a ‘Twisted Tale of Modern Britain', this blockbuster of a show explores how ‘ideas rooted in horror have informed the last 50 years of creative rebellion’, and there is a lot to absorb in this multi-layered ghost train ride of shapeshifting schlock-horror aesthetics. From the now familiar dernier cri of punk to the darkly fantastical works of 2019 Turner Prize winner Tai Shani; ghosts, ghouls, mysticism, and mayhem feature as a continuing rebellious thread throughout various landscapes of the dark re-imaginings of artistic psyches.
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| Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph, 2021 |
So here we have punk icon Jordan, painted by the underrepresented 70s painter and Duggie Fields contemporary Luciana Marinez, next to a Diamond Dog Bowie. Elsewhere there is a wall of large-scale images of Bat Cave clubsters in their gothy new romantic get ups, and a succession of outrageously attired drag artists sashaying down the stairs in Dick Jewell’s film Descending a Staircase which was shot at the seminal Kinky Gerlinky club night.
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| Luciana Martinez de la Rosa, Jordan, 1977, pastel on board |
The show is in three parts, Monster, Ghost and Witch. Monster is the punky, gothy, drag queeny, Leigh Bowery section. Ghost, as the gallery blurb states, ‘marks the collapse of hyperinflated 80s culture… defining a turning point in time between the dawn of a digital age of faceless audiences and invisible cyber wars’. So this is where Tricky’s trip hop meets the situationist sub-texts of Laura Grace Ford who reimagines London as a haunted house in her large-scale installation. Witch, the exhibition’s final act, celebrates the emergence of a younger generation often placing their work alongside their antecedents –Juno Calypso, for instance, is offset by Jane Arden. Each section is introduced by panels of engaging text which underscore the work with pertinent sociopolitical and metaphysical musings.
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| Juno Calypso, A Dream in Green, 2015 |
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| Jane Arden, Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven poster, 1970-71, designed by Alan Aldridge |
However as is so often the case in an ambitious show of this size there are shortcomings and omissions, and the interesting countercultural perspective was, for us, almost inevitably haunted by the phantoms of those who were not featured. We particularly missed the visceral multi-faceted work of Delaine Le Bas whose outsider perspective has often called out racism, hierarchy, and refugee and women shaming. The same applies to the horror-inflected films and performances of Paul Kindersley, with their current-day queer eye. And surely the very British DIY filmmaker Andrew Kotting, whose films include Diseased and Disorderly and Their Rancid Words Stagnate Our Ponds, would have been a perfect fit. As would something of the English art folk horror investigated by Michael Bracewell in the The Dark Monarch, a show he co-curated at Tate St Ives in 2009.
It is obvious that the curators worked hard to create a non-hierarchical overview of the influence of spooky stuff to scare the nation. But the bones of those skeletons still left in the unopened cupboard continued to rattle around our brains and as we exited the gift shop we couldn’t help but think of Terry Hall’s plaintive voice singing ‘this town is coming like a ghost town’… a line that links the now and then so perfectly but like the majority of post-punk was sadly absent from the gallery.
Cathy Lomax & Alex Michon, 2022
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| Entrance to The Horror Show! at Somerset House |
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