Stuffed dummies
ART PAUL GRINKE
Two exhibitions this week make a convincing attempt to show satire in the round. At the Grosvenor Gallery, Gerald Scarfe has clothed his scabrously pointed cartoons with plaster, chicken wire and yards of material and also produced a series of screenprints. At the happily reopened Robert Fraser Gallery, Jann Haworth shares her husband Peter Blake's lovingly nostalgic escape into Edwardiana with some exquisite, mocking needlework figures. Both shows make a welcome change from the rather demanding horizons of non-representational painting and sculpture.
Gerald Scarfe's cartoons are too familiar to need much elaboration. They are, I suppose, the embodiment of Swiftian venom in pen and ink, with the same obsessive relish for every human orifice as a potential sink of corrup- tion. Behind each puckered or bulbous lip lies
a writhing mass of lies waiting to spew forth, each hand stretched in benediction is really a
grasping claw. His targets in the present ex- hibition, the first public display of a most secretive artist, are not new and the figures he has created are such vulnerable Aunt Sajlys as Onassis, Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell. But his big treatment of them would draw a last rictus of pleasure from Gillray's gaping jaw.
All the figures are larger than life, except for Field-Marshal Montgomery and the Pope who have both shrunk to less than human stature and rattle around in their clothes alarm- ingly. The Pope, precariously held together by chicken wire, clutches the Pill as if it were the rock which occasioned the text `Tu es Peirus.' Montgomery, the most successful figure -in the show, hovers ghoulishly over a chessboard, on the -point of moving a tin soldier to swift ex- tinction, with his vulpine face eagerly watch- ing the camera. For the men we love to hate Scarfe pulls out all the stops. The Rev Ian Paisley leans from the cross as if it were a soap- box, and Enoch Powell, as a Janus-headed
blackbird, bends like a .contortionist to a battery of microphones. Onassis becomes -an
enormous octopus with gobstopper eyes and
a filmy nightdress in one -tentacle, while Prince Charles, elaborately hosed and gartered •for this inauguration, is hardly visible beneath the kind off 'ears elephants :fly with in nursery picture books. They will all give enormous offence in some quarters and-hours of Pleasure in others.
Ulm -1-lawortit's view of things is decidedly cosier, but no less evocative or sharply ob- served. Her figures come from the long dusty summers of Tetjeman's .poems --and the flicker- ing candy floss crunching evenings at the Bioscope. W. C. Fields and`Shirley Temple are the tutelary deities of the gathering, but most of -the figures need no identification and bear
ao labels. An old couple sitting in a parlour snuffed with antimacassars, potted ferns and whatnots are magnificently created, with the old woman's face made out of balls of wool and a snuffly old bulldog to complete the pic- ture. The centrepiece of the show is a delightful Teddy-bear's picnic with chintzy doughnuts and the animals all wearing an identical human face, rather reminiscent of Harold Wilson.
W. C. Fields, a noted misogynist. suffers female company in a kind of stuffed bas- relief, and a very Edwardian devil on the lines of Bela Lugosi stands in a box in a smart red suit with little skulls for buttons. The attention to detail is admirably maintained in all the figures and tableaux—the cloth faces far livelier and more realistic than in any wax- works I have come across. One or two more up-to-date figures keep company with the old- sters, including an Oldenburgian cheer leader and a strange robot which reminded me of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz- It is a curious assembly but absolutely irresistible.
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