Shut Up Actually Talk – Chiara Fumai at Nottingham Contemporary

Shut Up, Actually Talk: aggressive, progressive, brilliant.

When leaving the Carol Rama gallery space in Nottingham Contemporary after Shut Up, Actually Talk, I feel a little intimidated and more than a little bewildered, to the extent that I can’t even gauge others’ reactions to the piece. However, upon reflection, once the initial shock of a first encounter with performance art has had time to mellow, Chiara Fumai’s brief ‘radical feminist freak show’ remains challenging and provocative but is ultimately very effective.

Fumai has fashioned herself as faux-Circassian beauty Zalumma Agra, an attraction in P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century circus. Presented as a ‘star of the East’, as a pure woman saved from the impurity of slavery, this figure is forced into a role that works through a number of racial, sexual and gender stereotypes. This is especially poignant because Zalumma Agra was not permitted to speak when performing; her value as a freak show attraction required her silence. She was something to look at, something for others to surround with mythical discourses rather than a person with a voice of her own. Fumai addresses this problem of necessary silence, and offers the woman behind Zalumma Agra a language that shatters her illusory persona and turns the tables on the dumbfounded audience.

This language is the words of Italian radical feminist Carla Lonzi and her 1970s manifesto Rivolta Femminile. Fumai is verbally aggressive, spitting out the original Italian with the same vehemence as she uses when she spits on the gallery floor, at first seemingly reacting to an inadequate audience response. Her eye contact is persistent and intense, and her slight figure combined with the big hair falsely attributed to the Circassian race is imposing. There are long pauses, and meditations laced with malice on ‘who says…’ followed by a quotation or belief, each quickly revealed to be antithetical or at least not quite fitting to radical feminist thinking, instead feeding into the patriarchal frame of reference that allows figures like Zalumma Agra to function.

Fumai uses relations of speech and silence very successfully; the fact that Barnum’s Zalumma Agra is ‘shut up’ allows her to ‘actually talk’ on a symbolic level. Zalumma is an explicit example of routine oppression and interpellation, a template which applies not only to gender, as in this context, but could also apply to other intersectional forms of oppression involving race, religion and sexuality, for example. Fumai certainly actually talks during this performance, rendering her audience speechless, momentarily weakened and exposed by her verbal strength. In this sense, those who in the past have talked, those who have provided the narratives, are forced into silence. Fumai as Zalumma announces that she has finally found her ‘sort of humans’ and, once this has been achieved, it is ‘time to go’. She has actually spoken in a way that has shut us up, before stalking out of the room, while everyone shifts a little uncomfortably in their seats. I have stared at her as though she is an attraction at a freak show, and yet, by the end of the performance, I feel as if it is me who is being stared at.

Shut Up, Actually Talk is bold and intelligent, despite being initially unnerving. Its simultaneous subtlety and vulgarity interacts with the backdrop of Carol Rama’s works made up of bicycle tyre tubes: both artists contrast the spoken with the unspoken, the explicit with the implicit. For both, these relations seem to have a political, in this case feminist, edge. Fumai and Rama challenge the conventions surrounding whose thoughts, language and expressions carry authority, repeatedly asking: who gets to call who a freak?

Making Colour at the National Gallery

Source: National Gallery

Colour is an important aspect of they way we view objects and link concepts in the world. As a visual format, colour is also important in art, and has been for centuries. What the National Gallery’s exhibition Making Colour does, then, is to historicise this use of colour in art across the world and across the ages. It’s easy to view art from a different time and place with the same eye – an eye which experiences the Pantone Matching System almost daily on mugs, or absentmindedly plays with the digitised colour scale on Snapchat. But creating and reproducing colour is bound up in physical processes, technology; the hand as well as the eye. Making colour takes skill.

Instead of lying flat on a canvas, colour really does take centre stage in this exhibition, gaining new political, economic and technological dimensions. Making Colour is divided into different sections, beginning with the theories of colour developed by scientists like Isaac Newton and Ignaz Schiffermüller before moving through different individual colours: blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, gold, silver. These colours are inextricably linked to their origins and processes of collection and manufacture into pigments: a lump of lapis lazuli nestles beside Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow and a petri dish of cochineal.

Even more strikingly, the exhibition suggests that our visual conceptions of myth, religion and history are bound up in the politics of colour. The Madonna is depicted in blue because ultramarine was so rare and difficult to extract that it became more precious than gold. It is less flashy, more modest – suitable for the mother of Christ. However, in paintings such as Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer, this ultramarine is rich and smooth and decadent, with a visual depth that upstages the gold leaf of earlier Italian religious art. Similarly, purple came to be the colour of royalty because of its difficulty to produce, highlighted by the paintings of Queen Victoria and her family in the synthetic, accidentally discovered mauveine.

Some of the pieces on show were flooded with colour, their bold tones foregrounding colour as a kind of subject for the work. Edgar Degas’ Combing the Hair is bright with fiery reds and oranges, the girl’s reclining pose and long hair fashioned as one long sweep that becomes the background. A section of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure glitters on the wall, accompanied by a photograph of the whole object, a disused flat crystallised with copper sulphate. In other cases, colour is part of the subtlety of creating a work, revealing the techniques behind it. For example, one of the information videos shows that green was often used as a base for white skintones, to make them appear more natural. In some examples, the paint laid on top has deteriorated, leaving the face with an eerie green tinge. Another video demonstrates the making of oil and egg tempera paints. Once again, the seemingly abstract notion of colour becomes physical, existing as insects and minerals and powders and pigments to be mixed and crushed.

Colour in this context, then, is not only aesthetic, but also scientific. A flake of the surface of a painting can be trapped within resin and left to dry, and then the resulting transparent block placed under a microscope. Using this method, the different individual layers and colours can be viewed as a cross-section, while other, more advanced technology can identify the specific pigments in a painting. This stripping away of the ingredients of a painting, just for a moment, allows a glimpse of it without its aura; it becomes its layers of paint, its brushstrokes, its combination of colours. For a moment it is not otherworldly – it is skilled human handiwork.

As is to be expected, though, there is slight disjointedness between the art and the science in this exhibition. Viewed on a wall from a certain distance, fleeting images of impressionism and luscious painted velvet possess a kind of magic. However, placed on dark walls next to a description of the exact shade of green in the leaves, Making Colour sometimes falls short of what it sets out to do. The biggest problem seems to be that the text and the history surrounding the works fails to bring the disparate works together. While it is interesting, even necessary in an exhibition like this, to span a large temporal and spatial period, it often seems as if the paintings are visibly too spaced out in the gallery, and there is little real interaction between works, when this could have been very enlightening in itself. Perhaps a few more paintings would have helped to bridge this gap, or some more considered attempts at integration. Nevertheless, Making Colour encourages discussion about aspects of art often forgotten or overshadowed. When I think back to what I saw in the National Gallery on that rainy summer Tuesday, I remember the bright azurite sheen of a skirt, the yellow of a desco da parto, and the sparkling minerals from whence they came.