Ghislaine Leung, Public Sculpture, 2018. Courtesy Reading Central Library, Cabinet Gallery London and Towner, Eastbourne.
Worldbuilding
by Christabel Stewart
In their early 17th-century form, dollhouses were glass-fronted displays called “cabinet houses”. These cases were used to hold valuable miniature items, and were kept locked. By the end of the century, these houses had become more utilitarian structures, used to teach wealthier girls how to run a household: how to order the cook to provide the meals, how to direct the maids to make the bed – a panopticon which would train her to become the all-seeing, all-controlling lady of the house.
Barthes published the essays that would make up the 1957 book Mythologies as short pieces in the French literary review Les Lettres nouvelles between 1954 and 1959, in response to what he saw as “the myths of French daily life”. The media of French daily life that prompted them are diverse, or dissimilar (a newspaper, a photograph in a weekly, a film, a show, an exhibition) and their relevance was subject to his current interests. One of the essays is titled “Toys”, in which he contemplates the miniature replicas which accurately prefigure “the world of adult functions”. As he writes, “Toys here reveal the list of all things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, et cetera. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation, which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness… There exist for instance dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies… This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of housekeeping, to ‘condition’ her for the role of mother.”
Ghislaine Leung
Leung’s series of borrowed library toys are presented in a straight line with their library tags attached. Among them, we find the moulded plastic dollhouse, devoid of anything but necessary emblematic parts. The other domestic appliances, dwarfing the houses, are much more expressive of Barthes’ commentary in “Toys”, displaying much more detail to look just like the domestic equipment used by the child’s parents, carers or their helpers. The toys come from a library system currently being undermined by successive funding shortfalls, and these toys, lonely in the gallery space, underscore that play is often about negotiating discomfort as much as pleasure. As Leung told Cabinet in 2018, a “general notion of play in relation to artifice or movement that... historically relates to suspension, a cancelling out, and creating a void or hole.”
Ghislaine Leung, Public Sculpture, 2018. Courtesy Reading Central Library, Cabinet Gallery London and Towner, Eastbourne.
Flyer from Steven Warwick, HOUSE: performance at bobshop, Kreuzberg, 18 November 2023.
Steven Warwick
“There are social spaces with anti-social tendencies built in.” Centred around a model house the artist bought as a student at Nottingham Trent in 2003, House was created 20 years later as a performance piece at bobshop, Kreuzberg. In a dark room, Warwick read a text – “a kind of associative discussion appropriating a DVD commentary-style delivery” – next to the mini house on a small plinth illuminated by a mini lamp. Warwick describes the house as a “quite drab, post-war prefab”, and it is a distinctly realistic house made for model rail enthusiasts. In Germany, where the piece was performed, dollhouses tend to be more aspirational – imagine turrets – whereas in the UK, marketing is led with the mundane. As Warwick mused in his reading, a house’s banal exterior can also obscure a dark interior; the house as a site of danger.
Robert Gober
In Robert Gober’s Burnt House (1979-80) anxiety around sexuality and sexual identity are compressed into the figure of the white-clapperboard home. “My father, as a man, built the house that we lived in,” explains Gober. “This is what I learned a man does: builds houses.” Burnt House is his small-scale model “white colonial-style” house, very evidently charred by fire. The interior of the house is devoid of either furniture or inhabitants: we are observing the aftermath of some violence, felt in both the scarring and the absence.
Robert Gober, Burnt House, 1979–80. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.
Shit-shrine, 2023. Courtesy of Nir Altman gallery, curated by Ginny on Frederick.
Arash Nassiri
The title of this work by Arash Nassiri, presented as part of the show Gossips, came from a mishearing: the artist made a reference to a “Shia Shrine”, which his French collaborators heard as “Shit Shrine”. The grey house was found in a second-hand shop and spray-painted “metallic Audi”, turning the object of play into something severe. The green interior lighting turns on and off, like the “breathing” action that Apple computers would display in early versions of its laptops, simulating an anthropomorphic friendliness. The shrine that serves as a conversation partner to the piece is Shah Cheragh, an elaborate 12th-century funerary monument in Shiraz, Iran. Its sacred-profane name endows the work with a strange religious quality, a sense of something pulsing within – though what that might be in its grey, mass-produced shell, is unknown.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings
For Bleak House, first shown institutionally in Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway last year, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings gathered a series of dollhouses across a carpet-tiled room, atop tall metal table legs to bring them to eye level. Quinlan and Hastings’ joint practice continues to question what is taken to be irregularity within heteronormative family life. Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) looms over any discussion of the function of the toy house, a play in which the primary issues of commerce, gendered roles, women’s inequality, and the often ill-fitting qualities of marital status, induce a naive and then determined Nora Helmer to exit her life. The house itself is a metaphor for the narrow domestic activity that women of 19th-century Norway were squished into – an enforced state of dollhood – as well as a reference to the form of the stage itself, open-fronted, there to peer into. In Quinlan and Hastings’s spindly iterations, the houses emit a sound piece composed by Owen Pratt: the house speaks. ◉
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Bleak House, installation image, 2023. Courtesy of Kunsthall Stavanger. Photo: Erik Sæter Jørgensen.