CUCKOO REVUE
If Wilde's use of the studio in the opening scene of Dorian Gray constructs an era-defining social context, his understanding of Beauty as necessarily inanimate and artificial results in the aestheticisation of Basil Hallward's subject prior to its incarnation on canvas. Dorian Gray, with his great and ideal Beauty, is an artefact before he is painted: the picture is of a man conceived as a statue made from rose petals and ivory rather than seen as a corporeal human being. The consumption of personalities through their appearance or biography, and the degree to which they can exist as artefacts or glyphs, has been a consistent field of interest for Jane Topping. Her recent vignettes make use of features - lips and nostrils - excerpted from an eclectic range of published sources and push the fixed expressions of Paris Hilton, David Bowie, and members of the Smiths amongst others past recognition and any signifying role into anonymity and Topping's personal lexicon, where they are subject to reinvestment with meaning. The pop sensibility of these sources is reinforced by the manner of delivery which conflates the devotional sketches of the bedroom obsessive with technical device: it is a sensibility which provokes "subjectifictation" (defined as "objectification for personal use") and is an overarching condition of daily life. Circumscribed by incongruous oval frames fashioned in the single, deliberate sweep of a laden brush, "mirror" and "face" become interchangeable organising principles for these excerpts: further stages of superimposition and layering black out areas of background and introduce speculatively familiar head-and-shoulder outlines. In the title to "Dorian Gray", Wilde pointedly uses "Picture" as opposed to "Portrait": the notion of the "portrait" is concerned with the depiction of specific individuals whereas that of a "picture" or "effigy" is concerned with generality of type: (the ideal hovers somewhere in between). In these fugitive cameos, Topping plays with this distinction, ultimately concerned with the idea of rendering them players in her "Cuckoo Revue".
Fiona Jardine 2006