First, David Bowie took over the MCA Chicago with every artifact he may once have sneezed near — and now, Fleetwood Mac singer (and everyone’s favorite witchy godmother) Stevie Nicks is poised to make her Chelsea debut with a recently unearthed shoebox of her old Polaroid self-portraits. Taken with a shutter release cable, the images show a young Nicks in a variety of poses — some dolled-up backstage shots, many almost painterly in their staging. “I would begin after midnight and go until 4 or 5 in the morning. I stopped at sunrise, like a vampire,” Nicks said in a statement, describing her process (and reaffirming suspicions that she is an occult goddess). “I never really thought anyone would ever see these pictures.” And yet, they will, at New York’s Morrison Hotel Gallery beginning on October 10.
Fan of Nicks or no, however, this show seems on its face like a culmination of the more frustrating trends contemporary gallery culture has to offer: The “here’s some artifacts from a celebrity’s basement” mode of publicity-grabbing combined with an utterly undisguised plug for Nicks’s retrospective album, “24 Karat Gold” — which, surprise, is also the name of the exhibition. Plus, in the Guardian’s interview with Morrison Hotel Gallery owner Peter Blachley, reporter Maraithe Thomas brings up the term “selfie,” drawing attention to the “Instagram feel” of the shots — the irony of which is enough to send one tumbling into endless eyerolls — while Blachley apparently thinks that women never really idolized a rock star before Stevie Nicks, that men only respected Nicks for her looks, and probably that XX chromosomes are composed primarily of sugar and spice.
Still, amid all of this cynicism-stoking brouhaha are the images themselves — and hauntingly lovely images at that. Looking at the self-portraits (which, to Blachley’s credit, he stridently defends as “fine art”), it’s hard not to draw parallels to other great feminist artists of the time: Francesca Woodman, even Cindy Sherman, numerous women taking the camera into their own hands then turning it on themselves — including, apparently, the singer of “Edge of Seventeen.” Here’s hoping viewers can afford her some serious artist cred amid the rock star buzz.
— Anneliese Cooper (@DawnDavenport)
(Photo via StevieNicksWelshWitch/Tumblr)
