Exhibition Review: Jesse Darling: The Ballad of Saint Jerome, Tate Britain.
In the latest instalment of Tate’s ‘Art Now’ series, Berlin and London-based artist Jesse Darling revisits the legend of Saint Jerome and the lion. Through sculptures and site-specific installations, the exhibition explores ideas of identity centred on themes of vulnerability, including gender, sexuality, disability, companionship and love. Though Darling initially viewed the fable as a kind of love story, here she begins to question Jerome as symbolic of the patriarchal control exercised by institutions; be that the Church, the State, or in this case, the Museum.
And so, the story goes that when Jerome was met by an unruly lion, rather than reach for his crossbow, he tended to the animal’s injury. Removing a thorn from its paw, the lion became his faithful companion. The legend was a popular subject in art during the Renaissance period, with the lion representing the taming of the wild and Jerome, understanding and restraint. Acknowledging the lion’s pain is romantic in the sense that Jerome sees past its aggression; but the story also raises questions concerning power, control and the suppression of otherness. Darling’s work attempts to resist social and political constraints with an exhibition that is a culmination of playful pieces addressing complex themes. Toilet brushes, polyester packaging, medical equipment, and plastic water bottles give everyday materials a new and playful life. Like much of Darling’s previous work, personal themes are visible - disability being the most obviously recognisable in the presence of twisted mobility canes (a neurological disease paralysed most of the artist’s right arm). Parallels are drawn between the medical industrial complex and the church in a series of works titled No more St. Jerome, which question the imperial understanding of bodies.
The figure of Jerome functions in the context of Darling’s work as a stand-in for the museum and church, institutions which uphold the status-quo that sees art embedded in a system of capital and patriarchy. He is Tate Britain: a problematic figure where his decisions in translating the Bible for mainstream audiences set certain principals in place. In supplementary correspondence that accompanies the exhibition, between the artist and Anglican priest Reverend Dr ‘Tina’ Beardsley, Darling cites the gendering of words, such as ‘woman’ and ‘shame’, as becoming synonymous after Jerome. In many ways, this arguably put society on a path to where we are today. The parallels between the twin institutions of museum and church are clear. In the layout of the exhibition, the hole in the central white wall functions almost as an altarpiece. As spaces, both the church and the museum offer visitors a similar feeling that they are in the presence of true beauty. Something thus worthy of care; and art is historically referred to in relation to that which is deemed of value.
The idea that things are better cared for in a glass box or vitrine, is a belief inherent in the concept of the museum, where it is thought objects will be better looked after in this way than they could possible ever be in the environment they originated from. To fix the lion’s wound, Jerome tames it, thus instituting a hierarchical relationship that exercises and maintains control, in much the same way art institutions have historically functioned. Darling’s works appear as relics. They are artefacts that, placed under the guise of the exhibition space, have obtained worth in the same way Church culture afforded meaning to the trophies that came (allegedly) from saints, making them visual reminders of what one should believe. In her conversations with Beardsley, Darling comments that to her it seems as if ‘all of Western secular culture has been imagined in the model of the Christian church. It is a shame’, she writes, ‘that art has become such a “high-church” in whose great houses many feel unwelcome’. One should acknowledge, of course, that Darling is a European artist with her own institutional exhibition. There is something to be said then for getting into bed with the institution, where it is her first at the age of thirty-two.
It is significant that the wall text acknowledges the way Darling’s work challenges the conventions of the museum display. A quick nod to self-critique by Tate, I suppose - where sculptures created from cabinets typically used to exhibit art expose the patriarchal logic and structure of art institutions. Recognising that the exhibition questions how audiences perceive objects, and the ways in which meaning and value are ascribed through modes of display - the vitrine, the frame - arguably neutralises Darling’s point. When institutions acknowledge institutional critique, do the practices associated with this not become institutionalised in themselves?
Darling intends for the work to be subjective. Take from it what you will. ‘A picture is said to be a thousand words’, she tells Beardsley, ‘I sometimes think the only way to redeem objects, is to think about them in this way’. Yet while it may not be an attempt at activism, works crafted from everyday materials are an attempt to occupy and resist the space of the museum: a rejection of the institution and its outdated structures of viewing and collecting knowledge. Held up on buckled, bent legs, museum vitrines containing archival binders filled with cast concrete provide the most obvious subversion of the gallery-as-institution in Epistemologies (shamed cabinet).
Darling proves complexity in art is still possible - despite the fact that class and capital make many feel unwelcome. Successfully using humour to address the serious topics she is exploring, her work is a break from the slick, manufactured work that characterises the capitalist art world.
Jesse Darling: The Ballad of Saint Jerome is on display at Tate Britain, Milbank, until 24th February. Entry is free.