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<strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> <br />
<strong>pinksummer</strong> contemporary art, Genova, Italy <br />
Solo exhibition: January 20 -‐ March 21 2012 <br />
<strong>The</strong> first page <strong>of</strong> Georgina Starr's website features a brain floating on a white gravity free background. On the <br />
brain, one card from the Major Arcana <strong>of</strong> the divinatory Tarot rests on its corner, almost like the pickup <strong>of</strong> a <br />
turntable which has stuck on a corrupted groove; a shock becoming an obsession. <strong>The</strong> card is <strong>The</strong> Empress. <strong>The</strong> <br />
matter forming the brain appears pink, dense and sensitive; it looks like those highly performative chewing <br />
gums; exaggeratedly sweet, tasting like strawberry, generally irresistible for kids, but abhorred by adults, <br />
especially parents. In Italy this kind <strong>of</strong> chewing gum is called "Big Babol" (big bubble, being "babol" a misspelling <br />
<strong>of</strong> the English word bubble). ‘<strong>The</strong> Empress’ represents the complete woman, capable <strong>of</strong> love and understanding, <br />
the mother, the feminine creator, the one who is empress because <strong>of</strong> her power over nature. For the Gnostics, she <br />
is the Pistis Sophia. When <strong>The</strong> Empress is upside down in a Tarot reading, the card drops its benign meaning and <br />
indicates the possibility <strong>of</strong> becoming lost in abstraction, referring to the limitations <strong>of</strong> personal expression, <br />
coquetry and immaturity. Lost children (orphans) in the story <strong>of</strong> Peter Pan remain ageless all life long, outside <strong>of</strong> <br />
time. When Wendy asks Peter if he knows what love is, he answers bothered and evasive that even just the <br />
sound <strong>of</strong> that word <strong>of</strong>fends him. It is not by chance that ancient wise men, from Pythagoras to Plato, intended <br />
knowledge as the ability to recognize, remember, recall and use this knowledge to find happiness. Behind each <br />
lost child, there must be a mother who has lost her child, a lost mother, maybe an Empress turned upside down. <br />
One can associate the image on the website, the pink brain with the Tarot card, with a work by Georgina Starr <br />
called I am the Medium (2010). It is a vinyl record <strong>of</strong> locked grooves, each groove repeats endlessly until the <br />
needle is moved. It could be said that we are all records, sometimes playing tracks that sound so alien to our <br />
conscious mind that they appear threatening to our idea <strong>of</strong> identity. “I am the Medium” contains 250 excerpts <br />
from sittings with spiritualist mediums questioned by the artist about her future. Like a ventriloquist, even if <br />
with different modalities, a medium has the ability to speak using two different voices: his/her own and another <br />
one, that sounds like it is coming from remote and inner depths, used while in a trance to articulate messages <br />
from beyond. I am the Medium is the work that immediately precedes <strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> (Georgina <br />
Starr's fourth exhibition at <strong>pinksummer</strong>), and which also informs the maieutic process generating the puppet <br />
‘<strong>Junior</strong>’. <strong>Junior</strong> was created by the artist in her own image in 1994 (part <strong>of</strong> <strong>The</strong> Nine Collections <strong>of</strong> the Seventh <br />
Museum) and has now been brought back into the world after remaining shut inside a suitcase for 18 years. Last <br />
summer, while talking about her next show, Georgina Starr told us that the mediums she consulted for I am the <br />
Medium, speaking in a vague and oracular way, foretold <strong>of</strong> an impending maternity (which, actually, the artist has <br />
never desired). <strong>The</strong> induced reflection on the idea <strong>of</strong> motherhood (it seems funny, but it is not at all) caused the <br />
suitcase containing the now eighteen year old, but necessarily ageless <strong>Junior</strong> to open. "It was 1994 when I made <br />
<strong>Junior</strong>, I was in a hotel room in Den Haag, where I had to stay for two weeks. I made her to fight loneliness and
entertain myself. Together with <strong>Junior</strong> everything seemed to get better". With <strong>Junior</strong> in 1994, Georgina Starr also <br />
enacted a repeat performance <strong>of</strong> "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool". <strong>The</strong> song had originally been sung by <br />
Starr in her first ever live performance, which she had religiously prepared during her childhood for a family <br />
Christmas party. In 1974 the artist’s family adopted a little girl; the same year, two days before Christmas, the <br />
adoption agency took the baby back again. <strong>The</strong> young Georgina performed Jimmy Osmond’s popular song "Long <br />
Haired Lover From Liverpool" on that Christmas Day while her mother broke down in tears at the loss <strong>of</strong> her <br />
child. <strong>The</strong> work <strong>of</strong> Georgina Starr with its opposing and paranoid duality, where the joyful and the innocent are <br />
always accompanied by something disturbing and deeply sinister, seems like some sort <strong>of</strong> method; a path to <br />
navigate through something painful. In this sense, <strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> celebrates "the repatriation <strong>of</strong> the <br />
known", to quote the philosopher Remo Bodei. In a beautiful article which recently appeared in the Sunday issue <br />
<strong>of</strong> "Il Sole 24 Ore" titled "Piacere di fare conoscenza" (“Pleased to make your acquaintance”), Bodei assimilates <br />
such a cognitive process, triggered by something shocking and obsessive, to the spinning top <strong>of</strong> little Ernst, <br />
mentioned by Freud in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. <strong>The</strong> game consisted <strong>of</strong> launching the spinning <br />
top (to the sound <strong>of</strong> the German word Fort, meaning ‘away’) and finding it again (while shouting Da, ‘here it is’) <br />
by mimicking in that temporal delay the anguish for the removal <strong>of</strong> the beloved object (the mother) and the <br />
happiness <strong>of</strong> the rejoining. Indeed, all the projects presented by Georgina Starr at <strong>pinksummer</strong> over the last <br />
decade, including the "Da" <strong>of</strong> <strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong>, are a discourse on the lost child; from Bunny Lake, the <br />
little sister herself, to absent mothers: the mother <strong>of</strong> Bunny Lake, the natural one <strong>of</strong> the adopted sister, her own <br />
mother and maybe even a motherhood rejected, Georgina herself. In <strong>The</strong> Bunny Lake Collection, (created and <br />
presented in Genoa in 2000, and later at the Venice Biennale in 2001), the lost children killed the beautiful <br />
teenagers they could have become. Inside Bunny Lake Garden (2003), (first shown in life-‐size as an outdoor <br />
installation at Villa Medici in Rome, then as a maquette at <strong>pinksummer</strong>) presented a door-‐less red brick walled <br />
garden that created a claustrophobic space, as escapeless as some childhoods. Bunny Lake is the child central to <br />
Otto Preminger’s 1967 movie "Bunny Lake Is Missing". In the film it is not clear, until the final scene, if the child <br />
actually exists or she is just the fantasy <strong>of</strong> a hysterical woman. Georgina Starr watched the movie for the first <br />
time in 1980, while babysitting her adopted sister, lost and found again, a child who never knew her natural <br />
mother and who has gotten lost many times in her life. In <strong>The</strong> Face <strong>of</strong> Another (shown at <strong>pinksummer</strong> in 2007) <br />
Starr directly faces the mother as a subject matter. Her own mother, presented in the synthesis <strong>of</strong> an <br />
extraordinary double portrait, reveals the shreds <strong>of</strong> a not enjoyable and never enjoyed beauty, fragmented by the <br />
obscure and subtle evil <strong>of</strong> depression. One might say that, for better or for worse, nobody better than our <br />
<strong>of</strong>fspring can give the sense <strong>of</strong> passing time. Lacan might define <strong>Junior</strong> "le petit object à", a substitutive object, a <br />
kind <strong>of</strong> surplus being, born to fill a lack. Unlike the simulacrum and the fetish, the substitutive object was not <br />
born in place <strong>of</strong> a symbolic lack, but <strong>of</strong> a real one, right there where what is absent and was replaced should be or <br />
could be. <strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> will feature plenty <strong>of</strong> things, a parallel world, Starr's art at its best: <br />
watercolors (<strong>The</strong> Annunciations), a small stage, sculptures, a theatre curtain, videos and photos <strong>of</strong> vintage <br />
performers, titled <strong>The</strong> Mothers. Plenty <strong>of</strong> women, future or possible mothers aligned like dancers in a variety <br />
show, who assist distracted and overwhelmed by their belly growing bigger and bigger by itself, like a <br />
disorienting alterity, until nearly bursting.
<strong>The</strong> Annunciation <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> (1,2,3) watercolour on paper, 90cm x 120cm and <strong>The</strong> Decades, blown glass and metal, 2012 <br />
Below: <strong>The</strong> Annunciation <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> (Two Voices Enter the Bubble), watercolour on paper, 90cm x 120cm, 2012
Installation detail, <strong>The</strong> Brain, bubblegum & air, <strong>The</strong> TV Show Curtain (back) and <strong>The</strong> Annunciation <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong>, painting, 2012
Installation detail (above) and (below) <strong>The</strong> <strong>Joyful</strong> <strong>Mysteries</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong>, video still, 22 mins, 2012
One Devotion (Bridge), photograph, 2012
DETAIL. <strong>The</strong> Annunciation <strong>of</strong> <strong>Junior</strong> (Double Bubble), watercolour on paper, 90cm x 120cm, 2012
Bubbles for <strong>Junior</strong>, performance with 3 pregnant eighteen year olds, 2012
One Devotion (splits), C-‐print, 2012
<strong>The</strong> Decades, blown glass & metal, <strong>The</strong> Television Studio Curtain (with circular spot), 2012