Pink pointe shoes, Minnie Mouse ears, gauzy skirts and collages. If you swept up all the stuff from Rose English’s exhibition at Richard Saltoun, you’d basically have the bedroom of a cartoon 12-year-old in a saccharine children’s book, the kind where jolly Josephine’s only vice is too many toasted marshmallows.
This is deliberate. Throughout her career, English has dolloped out archly feminine symbolism – white ponies, bouncy crinolines, bows, hearts and make-up – with self-aware irony and loving appreciation.
Best known as a performance artist, this exhibition also features English’s ceramics, collages and photography. It ends with a video of ‘Plato’s Chair’, a 1983 performance piece plus audio recordings of the same work from four different locations.
These bits are the weaker parts of the show, succumbing to the common problem of trying to preserve and exhibit performance art and theatre. The whole buzzy immediacy of being at a live event is lost and instead it becomes a drawn-out, wobbly film of dubious sound quality.
English’s exhibition opens a year-long programme of work at Richard Saltoun called ‘100% Women’. The all-female season ricochets off depressing stats such as: only 30% of the artists on the books of London’s major commercial galleries are women. And 2018 represented a ‘new low’ in gallery representation for women.
That’s poor form for London’s artboy gallery owners. Especially because, and I mean this with love, the artworks here feel a bit ‘of their time’ (the early ’70s) and [*picks up megaphone*] SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED SINCE THEN. For a show titled ‘Forms, Feminisms and Femininities’, it’s hard not to reflect on how much the second two words in the list have moved on since English created her tiny dancers with their vaginas showing.
It’s still very much worth seeing, though. English’s output is the art equivalent of ‘fuck’ written on a mauve Love Heart sweet: irreverent, direct and still tasting good.