Some exhibitions are so crammed with information, a writer is advised to bring in technical assistants – wingwomen – to help navigate all the layers. Art-bothering can be such a lonely profession.
The Art Gallery of Ontario’s Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is just such a show, and then some. A collection of cut-and-paste works made by middle-class Victorian ladies, the show reminds the viewer how much of our current appropriation-based culture comes out of the 19th century.
A century and a half before we had any popular dialogue around multiculturalism, détournement, deconstruction, relational aesthetics – or any terminology that describes transferring images into a new (and thus altering) context – Victorian women armed with scissors, glue and a handful of family snapshots were busy creating photocollages. Theirs was a brand-new media world in which the stability and reliability of the recorded moment, and of the captured image itself, were up for grabs.
Untitled page from the Gough Album, late 1870s. Collage of watercolor and albumen prints— Victoria & Albert Museum
To help me unravel this back-and-forth dialogue between 100-year-old works and the very contemporary practices they prefigured, I brought along two artists mining similarly rich veins. Natalie Wood is a Toronto-based multimedia and video artist currently preparing for an exhibition at Ontario’s Art Gallery of Peterborough. Stephanie Rogerson is a writer and collagist co-curating an upcoming show of historical and contemporary lesbian art. I should always be so well-governed.
All three of us immediately noticed several things going on in the photocollages: patterns that made us want to know more about the lives of the individual artists. The works convey intense anxiety about the patriarchal family order.
No matter what the settings built around the cut-out photographs (photos were placed inside illustrations of perfect drawing rooms, or on watercolour street corners, or in the baskets of flying balloons drawn in ink), a paterfamilias almost always takes centre stage, often standing over a seated woman and/or children. In only a few of the works were women positioned in the centre or the top half of the image. However, within these neatly ordered patriarchies, disruptive elements are at play.
“I have a deep interest in the birth of popular culture,” Rogerson tells me after our promenade through the AGO. “I found that the women used collage, and the new industry of photography, to insert themselves into popular culture. It was a way for them to be part of the industrial boom.
Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator (English, died 1881). Untitled page from the Cator Album, late 1860s/70s Collage of watercolor and albumen prints
“There is also a disposability to the works – the photos were relatively cheap at the time, and one could collect them or dispose of them. Isn’t that always ‘women’s work’ – gathering and disposing? There are certainly a lot of power games here that maybe we can’t totally unpack, at this distance. There are family issues going on here that we can never fully understand.
“The idea of women’s work being nimble, being done by hand, from scratch, like quilting, is also here, along with the women’s role of being the family archivist, running the social world of the family.
“And,” Rogerson adds, smiling, “there are also some gentle perversions going on, perhaps unconscious sexualities being explored – especially in the more fantastic works, the fairyland pieces.” In one of those, men dressed in what might be cricket uniforms are lounging atop a water lily.
