Ella Slater speaks with Alex Margo Arden on the occasion of her solo exhibition, Safety Curtain, at Auto Italia, Bethnal Green.
If there’s one thing that we should have learnt from the previous year, it is that time is not linear. The past (settler colonialism and genocide) is also present, and the future (apocalyptic wildfires) is present too. Alex Margo Arden is fascinated by this tentacular, unruly conception of history; her artistic practice, through both material investigation and speculation, refutes any sort of straightforward “truth.” In her current solo exhibition, Safety Curtain, at Auto Italia, she uses theatrical methodologies to interrogate the ways in which we engage with that monumental, physical embodiment of the historical canon: the museum.
Safety Curtain takes as its starting point the wave of climate activism which has targeted the museum in recent years. Arden’s reproductions of defaced paintings — over here are three renditions of the Mona Lisa in cream-cake limbo; over there is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, doused in opaque tomato soup — embody the complexities of these often brief, but invariably scandalous, acts. Arden calls them gestures of “symbolic damage,” which makes them literally an image atop an image. It is this that distinguishes the increase in art-directed activism since 2010 from historic iconoclastic actions, such as those of the 20th century suffragette movement. On the contemporary activists’ part, this is an intentionally mediated technique which satisfies the media economy’s demand for sensation in exchange for attention — though it has been criticised both for playing into the enemy’s hands and alienating the public. However, any publicity is good publicity and as the artist points out, much like history, the “progress” or “success” of these actions cannot be easily measured.
Arden’s research draws heavily on materiality — which is not to say that her work erases the root problem of this kind of activism, or the motivations of the protests themselves. Arguably, it does the opposite through the interrogation of both the (im)permanent nature of contemporary activism and its (lack of) visibility. Like the smearing of pea soup or mashed potatoes over a high-profile “masterpiece,” Arden’s reproductions are also symbolic acts. Made through amalgamating images of the original protests, which often take the form of social media screenshots or shaky iPhone footage, the artist then worked with a reproduction studio to translate the resultant digital compilation into paint. The accurate outcome is juxtaposed by the many hands — and the consequent layers of mediation — which the image has passed through to reach this point. In this sense, accuracy does not necessarily mean objectivity, and this is the contradiction at the heart of Arden’s work: history, mediated as it is, is an unreliable narrator.
Arden points out that, after the event has passed, institutions rarely acknowledge the activism their objects have been subject to. Although this is partly to discourage further attacks, it contributes to the erasure of these alternative histories. The historical artefact is often presented in museum settings as if it exists outside of reality and time, in some “higher” aesthetic realm. Safety Curtain’s reconstructions of subterranean acts complicate this approach. ‘I’m less interested in the object as it comes out of the artist’s studio in 1887,’ Arden tells me as we stand in front of her immortalised, soup-doused Van Gogh, ‘than the object as something that’s been in the world since then.’ Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson has called the selective acknowledgement of cultural encounter and history the “regime of the visible.” Not only does it conceal responses to the museum — it also hides their causes, enabling the greenwashing and fossil capital which uphold the walls of various institutions. Arden’s work is a direct challenge to this. Her practice is both iconoclastic (she paints the damage into the artwork), and reparative, insofar as it restores material histories. She leans into this ambiguity: ‘This is not a polemic. I think good art should ask a lot of questions, and make people ask a lot of questions of it, too.’
It is striking that in dealing with the realm of history, which is founded on the unstable idea of the “factual,” Arden chooses to use methodologies attributed to the theatrical. In a 2023 presentation with Ginny on Frederick, she reproduced crime scene photography taken on the film set of Rust (2021), following the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins by Alec Baldwin. In this case, Arden mobilised reproduction to question the objectivity of photography. Like history, ‘photography is thought of as the truth,’ she tells me, ‘but actually, when reading a photograph, there’s so much you interpret. I’m interested in the tension that creates.’
Interestingly, Safety Curtain doesn’t shy away from photography as a medium itself. The show includes a series of images depicting the barricade of Les Misérables as a painted theatre backdrop (Les Mis was also the subject of a Just Stop Oil protest in 2023, and its cancellation is restaged through posters on the exterior of the gallery). ‘Theatre itself is the layering of image,’ Arden tells me. The title Safety Curtain — referring to the heavy, fireproof fabric which covers the stage in many large theatres — consequently becomes a metaphor for the impenetrable layer of mediation which separates art from viewer, actor from audience. Arden’s Les Mis photographs also reference an entirely different account of replication, in which the original production was controversially reimagined in a more economically efficient redesign. Again, there are hidden layers of complexity within the artist’s process: she employed scenic maintenance staff from the original production to assist her in producing the depicted backcloth. The exhibition continuously returns to the theme of a wayward past; one which bleeds into the present.
This idea is further embodied by an installation of art handling crates at the rear of Auto Italia, whose tall stature imbues them with a corporeal presence. Indeed, they were once filled with plaster casts of bodies, used during the 18th and 19th centuries to teach classical ideals and anatomic accuracy to art students at the Royal Academy. These casts would become the target of a series of protests in 1968, which questioned the enduring relevance of the Western art canon. Arden repurposes their containers as a fictional archive of museum objects. Each item, whether ornate frame or plastic sandwich, is accompanied by an acrylic identification tag. The artist is one of a number of contemporary practitioners questioning the ostensible “truth” of the archive through its reenactment, though her approach is uniquely inseparable from the institution in its utilisation of “real” items. ‘These methods for portraying the historic presence of humans actually accentuate their absence of humanity,’ she tells me. ‘Yet these are how people perceive the histories they show; they are how history is told.’
Through Safety Curtain, Arden has built her own, material history — one based not in linearity and erasure, but in the disturbance of temporality and social, as well as political, complexities. The result does not provide any clear answers: to the effectiveness of art-directed climate activism, nor to contemporary museology. Instead, Arden raises questions, complicating the manner in which we approach the representation of history, particularly that which is marginal, or confrontational, to the Western canon. ‘I want to give a lot,’ she tells me, ‘so that you might see this work a hundred times and continue getting something new, or so that your views have room to change over time, like the political action, or the theatre production.’ Here, like in both theatre and life, originality and artifice are utilised in tandem, rather than in opposition.
Written by Ella Slater.
Safety Curtain runs until 23 March 2025 at Auto Italia, Bethnal Green, London.
