Ravishing Maggie

Walking into the White Cube gallery in London and approaching Maggie, Marcus Harvey's portrait of Margaret Thatcher, I feel a rising sense of pleasure. Simply by moving around the exhibition space, I discover that I have the power to change the form of Margaret Thatcher's presence. Viewed from the entrance, her characteristic steely gaze, her air of patrician authority and self-possession, radiate from what at first appears to be a large-scale, black and white reproduction of a close-up photograph of Thatcher as Prime Minister (figure 1); (1) but as I move nearer to the portrait, its photographic appearance fragments into a densely populated high relief composed of thousands of plaster-cast sprayed objects. (2) Protruding towards the spectator and inviting closer scrutiny, these are revealed as a bizarre mixture of disproportionate vegetables, skulls, piles of coins, pointing fingers, missiles, phalluses, and cartoon masks of Blair and Thatcher herself (figure 2). Maggie turns out to have a formal duplicity: like the infamous and lethal femme fatale, she looks like one thing but turns out to be another. The portrait's compositional mutability literally undoes the certainty of Thatcher's gaze in the photograph. Her unshakable look appears increasingly unconvincing as her surface assurance turns out to lack the depth of its convictions. Maggie's changing intelligibility and phallic preponderance seem to mock Thatcher's famous claims to represent no-nonsense transparency, traditional family values and sexual morality, and ordinary British decency. In contrast to the notion that Thatcher was a figure of 'magnificent coherence' (as stated on the back cover of her autobiography) this portrait invites us to reconsider Thatcher's authority through our encounter with her disintegration. (3) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] What feels particularly gratifying for me in this encounter is the power conferred upon the viewer in the gallery to control the process of revealing the duplicity of this most intransigent of political leaders. By walking into the space of her controlling vision, the viewer is given the power to undo Maggie. Moving through the limits of her image and its rhetorical invincibility, we encounter the multiplicity of her effects, associations and targets: what we might think of as the detritus of Thatcher's legacy. In the face of the confidence of her direct look, we are invited to approach the fragments behind her rhetoric and make them appear and disappear simply through our own movement. I find myself seeking out the optimum position from which to exercise maximum control: the place where I can both see her image in its totality and sense her imminent fragmentation into an eccentric collection of objects. This transformative movement offers a pleasurable and even compensatory sense of power lacking to so many people at the time the photograph was first deployed. If few other Prime Ministers have been transformed into images of parody to quite the extent that Thatcher has been, this is perhaps a sign of the impotence felt by those she attacked, and of the desire for revenge for the extent of the damage her policies inflicted on what we might, in shorthand, call the social fabric. To dissolve the resolve of the Iron Lady in this way invites an irresistible repetition. A close encounter with the serious face of political certainty swiftly witnesses its dissolution into the fragments of free-association which blend with some of the more literal symbols of her vision. Somewhere between the apparently random collection of objects in a child's fantasy game (or the puzzling associations of a remembered dream) and the more systematic modelling of town planning miniatures or of a busy Monopoly board, the pieces forming Maggie's face become an archaeology of Thatcher's ambitious and transformative vision for rebuilding Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. The ordered, grid-like layout of the high relief contrasts with the inclusion of both obvious and more baffling objects

Art · Art history · Gaze · Portrait · Psychoanalysis · Scrutiny · Theology · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychology

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