In the 1985 film adaptation of EM Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Cecil Vyse, a supercilious slimeball Helena Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch is engaged to before she sees sense and elopes with sexy socialist George Emerson.
Anthea Hamilton’s new exhibition, ‘The Prude’, takes the buttoned-up Edwardian dweeb Day-Lewis got so right as its inspiration. Prudes, in this context, aren’t just skin- and sex-phobes, they’re the Fun Police, the joy zappers delivering their refusals of more wine, more dessert or more dress-buying with perfectly poised prickery.
Hamilton, in contrast, does have fun. This (sort-of) immersive exhibition occupies both Thomas Dane gallery spaces. At No 3 Duke Street you’ll find grayscale tartan wallpaper enlarged so it looks like hashtags. Massive orange gerbera daisies and peacock butterflies invade, along with a blown-up cartoon woman by R Crumb.
A few doors up at No 11, the upstairs hallway resembles a giant, furry battenberg cake. In the next room is a series of photos showing a very un-Cecil guy striking various naked poses, bum on white sofa included. In the final one, a huge fabric butterfly watches over platform-boot sculptures and a white-tiled sofa filched from the artist’s recent Tate Britain exhibition ‘The Squash’.
There’s an element of ‘continuation’ to this show in terms of Hamilton’s career. At points, it just feels like Thomas Dane has made a very attractive sales room out of her greatest hits (the wavy boots, the squared-off furniture, the woven mats, the reference to her 2013 work, ‘Wrestler Kimono’).
But at other, more exciting, points, it’s an interesting evolution of earlier ideas. The triffid-scale plantlife and insects suggest Hamilton is gradually making her way around a psychedelic version of the English garden, from dancing squashes at the Tate to jumbo-sized daisies and lepidoptera.
Everything here is very ’90s: chunky Geri Halliwell footwear, faux-fur, tartan, daisies. It’s like a ’97-issue Volkswagen New Beetle exploded, leaving in its wake a mountain of pre-millennium rubble. ‘Bad’ taste wins out, which is the point. This is anti-beige propaganda, prude-repellent in the form of art. Lucy Honeychurch would approve