Piss Artists 2: Helen Chadwick (Piss Flowers)

Helen Chadwick in a field of Piss Flowers

Photo by Kippa Matthews (1992)

 

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us, the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a famous work by the second of these three piss artists, Helen Chadwick ...

 

 

II. 

 

The British artist Helen Chadwick died (relatively) young - she was only 42 - but not before she completed the work by which I, like many of her admirers, best remember her - Piss Flowers (1991-1992). 

 

Piss Flowers is a work composed of twelve sculptures made by quite literally pissing in the Canadian snow and then pouring plaster into the (pre-cut) flower-shaped cavities left by the warm streams of urine. 

 

These casts were then attached to stem-like pedestals based on the fat-bodied shape of a hyacinth bulb, before being cast in bronze and enamelled white.        

If it sounds like all good clean fun (whatever that means), Chadwick insisted that, actually, it was hard work producing the dozen finished pieces and they also cost her £12,000, which might sound like a small or large sum of money, depending on one's circumstances [1].   

The Piss Flowers were displayed (on artificial grass) as part of Chadwick's solo exhibition - amusingly entitled Effluvia - at the Serpentine Gallery, in the summer of 1994 [2]. Happy days ...

 

 

III.

 

Enchanted by the fact that the majority of flowering plants possess both male and female sexual organs and have found a way to incorporate sexual difference into their singular being, Chadwick wanted to produce a work which celebrated this via a form of erotic play, or what she describes in a poem written at the same time as "Gender-bending water sport" [3].   

 

Thus, it was important that she and her male partner, David Notarius, both pissed into the snow; she using her liquid waste to create the central phallic-shaped pistil and he directing his urine to produce the delicate, labial-looking circumference. In the same poem referred to above, Chadwick writes of "Vaginal towers with male skirt" [4].   

 

Later, she would describe Piss Flowers as a metaphysical conceit - and a deeply romantic work in which two people are united as one via bodily expression. It might also be seen, as one commentator rightly points out, as an example of indexical art - i.e., art that doesn't appear to be authored but directly preserving an imprint of reality (an idea that had long fascinated Chadwick). 

 

Whether one finds the flowers beautiful or repulsive (or both) is, of course, a matter of individual judgement; one local councillor up in the East Midlands was quoted by the Nottingham Evening Post as saying: "I doubt the minds of the people who can create things like this." [5] 

 

Whilst personally I wouldn't want a fleur de pisse planted in my back garden, I do admire Chadwick's attempts to create things of beauty out of unconventional materials, such as bodily fluids and base matter.

 

And her attempt to effect a becoming-plant by entering into an unnatural alliance with the snow in such a manner that queer forms blossom from molecular forces is not only artistically daring but - from a Deleuzean perspective - philosophically interesting. 

 

One can't help wondering what would Linnaeus say ...?

 

Notes

 

[1] £12,000 in 1992 was the equivalent to around £31,000 today.

 

[2] Effluvia received widespread critical attention and national press coverage. It was seen by over 54,000 visitors - a record number for the gallery at that time.

 

[3] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

      Unfortunately, I cannot locate this poem online and do not know if it was ever published. However, I did come across (what I think is termed) an ekphrastic poem written by Jo Shapcott, entitled 'Piss Flower' (2018), which can be read online (thanks to The Poetry Archive) by clicking here. It is clearly inspired by Chadwick's work.  

 

[4] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

 

[5] The fact that this censor-moron was a councillor up in D. H. Lawrence country only goes to show how little things have changed; 60-odd years earlier, Lawrence's art was attacked as the work of a depraved sex maniac - including his watercolour Dandelions (1928), which famously depicts a man pissing on some flowers: click here. 

 

 

To read the first post in this series - on Andy Warhol's Piss and Oxidation Paintings (1977-1978) - please click here.

 

To read the third post in this series - on Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) - please click here.

Continuous as the Stars That Shine ...

Osterglocken (SA/2023)

 

"When all at once I saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils ..." 

 

I. 

 

Often known by its Latin name - Narcissus [1] - the daffodil was as highly regarded in the ancient world as it is within the modern era: Greek philosopher and floraphile Theophrastus, for example, often mentioned them in his botanical writings; as did the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder. 

 

However, it was left to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Linnaeus to formally identify them as a genus in his Species Plantarum (1753), at which time there were only six known species, whereas now there are over fifty (although the exact number remains disputed) [2].   

 

And it was left to the British Romantic poets to really establish the cultural and symbolic importance of the narcissus in the modern imagination. For with the exception of the rose and the lily, no flower blossoms more within the pages of English literature than the daffodil; Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats all wrote of the eternal joy that these flowers can bring.  

 

 

II. 

 

But surely everyone - not just William Wordsworth and the Welsh - loves to see daffodils flowering in the spring, don't they? 

 

At any rate, I love them: I love their bright golden colour and the manner in which a trumpet-shaped corona is surrounded by a six-pointed star formed by the tepals; and I love the fact they come up every year, regardless of external conditions, nodding in defiant affirmation of life.    

But my love of daffoldils is also a class thing; the common daffodil growing by the roadside and at the bottom of the garden has none of the ornamental superiority or cultivated pretension of the tulip (a bulb that is in my mind forever associated with the nouveaux riches in 17th-century Europe). 

 

 

III.

 

When I was a child - and neighbours still had front gardens, not driveways - I used to love stealing daffodils every Easter to give to my mother and I was touched that MLG should remember this and placed a single yellow flower in my mother's coffin prior to her funeral; she would have liked that [3]. 

 

And, of course, even without the personal context, such a gesture would have been entirely appropriate. For whilst daffodils often symbolise rebirth and resurrection, so too are they closely associated with death ...

 

The ancient Egyptians, for example, used to make decorative use of narcissi in their tombs, whilst the ancient Greeks considered these flowers sacred to both Persephone and Hades. Indeed, the former was said to be picking daffodils when she was abducted by the latter and taken to the Underworld.

 

The fact is, like many beautiful-looking things, daffodils are highly toxic, containing as they do the alkaloid poison lycorine - mostly in the bulb, but also in the stem and leaves - and if you ingest enough lycorine then death will follow a series of very unpleasant symptoms including acute abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea, trembling, convulsions and paralysis.  

 

So do make sure, dear reader, that you know your onions and never confuse these with daffodil bulbs ... 

    

 

Notes

 

[1] According to Greek myth, the beautiful-looking young man of this name - Νάρκισσος - rejected the romantic advances of others, preferring instead to gaze fixedly at his own reflection in a pool of water. After his death, it is said that a flower sprouted in the spot at which he spent his life sitting. 

      Interestingly, although the exact origin of the name is unknown, it is often linked etymologically to the Greek term from which we derive the English word narcotic (Narcissus was essentially intoxicated by his own beauty). 

      As for the word daffodil, this seems to be a corruption of asphodel, a flowering bulb to which the former is often compared.

 

[2] In 2006, the Royal Horticultural Society's International Daffodil Register and Classified List identified 87 species. But according to the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families produced in 2014, there are only 52 species (along with at least 60 hybrids). Whatever the correct figure might be, the fact is that many wild species have already become extinct and many others are increasingly under threat due to over-collection and the destruction of natural habitats.

 

[3] When my mother died last month, aged 96, she had been living with dementia for almost a decade and it might be noted in relation to our topic here that daffodils produce a number of alkaloids that have been used in traditional forms of healing and one of which - gelantamine - is exploited in the production of a modern medicinal drug used to treat cognitive decline in those with Alzheimer's.     

 

 

This post is for Maria.