A Red Riding Hood costume hangs in the centre of Xhibit 08, an exhibition of selected works from the University of the Arts London, as two isolated figures stare through windows with their backs to the viewer in Anne Bunting Branch’s paintings like relics from a Victorian ghost story. A sense of Romantic escapism, a nurturing of childhood fantasy, has been undulating in the art world in recent years; but with an aura of something contaminated, of a tainted utopia. While Rachel Whiteread’s latest work comprises several old dolls’ houses, gloomily lit with a sense of a lived-in past that has been coldly abandoned by its inhabitants, Tim Walker’s exhibition at Design Museum displays an archive of dark, fantasy-themed photography inspired by Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and A Midsummer Nights Dream.
The concepts underlying Walker’s photography are sourced from the fantastical books he read in his youth - of Lewis Carroll, C.S Lewis and the illustrations of John Tenniel. His photographs present a Romantic vision of a lost English countryside imbued with the extraordinary, with colours and objects that temporarily turn the real into the positively unreal. But the fantasy isn’t always perfect – things are stained, destroyed, abused and broken, but in such a subtle and beautiful way it is almost imperceptible. A ballet dancer poses beside a clay swan, her knee elegantly encased in a bandage as she rests on an oversized, Dali-esque crutch; a chandelier is strung with yellowing skulls and bones; a room in the regal Eglingham Hall, Northumberland, is suffused with graffiti.
The notion expressed through this unreal world that he creates is clear; that reality is only an illusion itself. As the artist states, ‘everything is contrived; nothing is real. You try to make your own real moments. And then you go home and make sense of it.’ Hence, Walker’s work is the product of his own ‘dream state’ - the level of consciousness at which he is able to perceive his imagination as reality itself. In his compositions, Nature is brought uncomfortably inside, while beds and chairs from inside are dragged into the countryside, where purple horses roam amongst dead trees, burdened with the weight of French cakes suspended with ribbons from their branches. With reference to Walker’s work, Alexander Liberman states that ‘photography, a modern ‘opium of the people’… has the ability to change our vision momentarily and move us into a more attractive realm of existence.’
A resonance of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and nineteenth century Romanticism era is evident. But depictions of fantasy and escapism during these times were often interpreted as a product of mental instability. Francisco de Goya underwent a mental breakdown in his later years, experiencing noises in his head which coincided with his Fantasy and Invention series, an underworld of dark, nightmarish scenes. William Blake claimed to have had biblical visions, and was regarded as mad. But his Romantic peer William Wordsworth observed this diagnosis from another perspective: ‘There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.’ Blake believed in a force greater than his own mortality, his own humanness - ‘I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning sight. I look thro' it and not with it.’
A fantasy renaissance is steadily growing in the realm of the arts. England’s individuality is dying, surrendering to capitalism and global influence, so fantasy is turned to like a drug, as an alternative perspective. David Hancock’s paintings hark back to English Pre-Raphaelitism but with contemporary subjects – figures pose like the Madonna amongst bleak urban landscapes, their eyes hunting for a psychological escape. Peter Doig’s paintings have the phosphorescent aura of a dream, the blurred, hollow-eyed features of his figures merging into the landscape are highlighted with flickers of toxic colour, their vague shapes reflecting in rippling pools of murky water.
As Dostoyevsky questions the meaning of insanity through Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, these artists tease the delicate partition that separates creativity and madness. And perhaps the only beauty to be found in this world has derived from something slightly insane. The opposite of insane is normal, banal; and how can we ever progress from this? As Oscar Wilde suggests, ‘it is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has ever been made.’
Words: Amy Knight
Illustrations: Julia Pott