These are exciting times in art. Every day seems to bring new evidence of fertility and achievement in two key areas — black art and women’s art. Some have been sniffy about it and are calling it a fashion, but they’re wrong. It’s a revelation. The canon is being rewritten and accompanying the rewrite is a storm of discovery.
Not that Helen Chadwick or Penny Slinger, who share a punchy and even startling display at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, are a pair of unknowns. I remember Chadwick in particular from my early days as a critic when she would regularly lambast me for not understanding her work and being such a bloke. She was right. I should have praised her more.
The present show makes clear that Chadwick (1953-96) and Slinger (b 1947) were significant pioneers. So ahead of the game were they that only now has art finally caught up with them. Their concerns were the concerns of now. Their territory — female sexuality, the woman within, the balls spouted by the patriarchy — is le territoire d’aujourd’hui.
The show begins with a set of no-nonsense collages by Slinger that confront you with female sexuality like a slap in the face. Orgasmshows an ecstatic female head gorging itself on grapes while body fluids trickle down her cheeks and a butterfly flaps its wings. Wow. That must have been some night. A sizzling collage called The Surprised Tin Opener relies on a naughty visual pun involving a sardine tin and giant finger, situated in that place that men can never find. Allegedly!
While Slinger spends the show delving brazenly into corners of the female id that were previously considered impolite, Chadwick has a wider set of concerns. Female sexuality is one of her issues, but she appears more interested in the assignation of roles by a patriarchal society. What’s good, though, is how the bloke-bashing is done with such wit and elegance.
The key works here feature Chadwick, in the nude, dancing a ballet of independence with a range of domestic appliances: a fridge, a washing machine, a cooker. It’s like a surrealist episode of Strictly: Chadwick dancing the cha-cha-cha with a Hotpoint. Because she’s nude and agile, she seems to stand for a feisty and inviolate female truth that is dancing rings around the static domestic machinery: Woman 10 — Appliances 0.
That all this is intended as a satire on the role of the modern woman as presented in lifestyle supplements and television advertising is made clearer by a rediscovered video of an early Chadwick performance in which a set of grotesquely costumed pantomime women — nipples the size of eggs, bushes as big as a crow — lounge slobbishly around a pretend home while Radio 2 plays a succession of absurd male anthems to imagined femininity: notably Charles Aznavour singing She. Made in 1976, Domestic Sanitation is a wonderfully wonky fusion of throwaway British humour and eternal truth.
On Sexuality is at Richard Saltoun, London W1, until Jan 10
