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Girls
Our complicity in the deification, the commodification, indeed the destruction eventually wrought in the lives of these girls is directly addressed by Kevans’ installing them in a working model of a fan’s bedroom. (Lie back – and dream of Britney). The victimhood explicit in for instance Britney’s lyrics and song-titles, (‘I’m a Slave 4U’) finds a resonance in the devotion of so many girls. Girls who fail to be quite like her and who are crushed as they crush their idols into conformity with impossible dreams and expectations. In idolizing they destroy their gods and are in turn destroyed (until the next is offered up to them to staunch their Rimmel’d tears) by the star’s defection or decay. Our collusion in creating and consuming this glamour-fodder, these dream-stuffed children, mirrors the guilt of the dictators and tyrants of her previous ‘Boys’ series. We accept and obey fantasy-capitalism’s image of our mass-produced desires. And will stop at nothing to get what we have been persuaded we want. The face of ‘girlhood’ has changed during the ages – passed from short-lived generation to generation – obedient to the diktat of the dream-factory, Max Factor and Pop Idol. Strange Metropolis Marias, commanding in slavery. The condition of stardom has itself grown up. At first weirdly promoted to premature glory in long evening gowns, then exploited crassly and less often subtly in films which condemn and yet simultaneously pander to it, now the fans queue at auditions eager to be next, successor to the perishable throne. Each mired in make-up; savagely arrested in a limbo of false pubescence. The attempt to resist change is permanently caught in the very swiftness of each painting’s execution, floating somewhere uneasily between Boltanski, Richter and the pavement portraitists of Shaftesbury Avenue; their likenesses are lifted clear of the caricature of their lives. Using publicity photos, drawing them with the scrutiny of both a fan and artist, Kevans by changing the medium both distances the crime and reverses the hubris of Pygmalion – the love that animates flesh with art. Hatched by art directors torn we guess between lubriciousness and cupidity, these poses’ repainting liberates something more intimate than lust – the despair and uncertainty in these girls’ faces. And as her project has developed it is certain that pity informs these images. The biographies avidly read in glossy magazines are on reflection obituaries. A moral allegory, a children’s fable gone sour. Their entire image is predicated upon the question ‘where, or indeed what, are they now?’ Text by Studio 1.1
Studio 1.1 7th April - 7th May 2006
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