NINA MAE FOWLER: While I’m Still Warm

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Sustaining her infectious interest in Hollywood’s golden age, the arrestingly beautiful selection of works revel in the era’s sheer visual richness and takes a cool-headed look at its sometimes lurid inner workings. Steeped in both the glamour and grotesquery of stardom, the show brings a mortician’s scalpel to the immaculately made-up corpse of celebrity culture both historical and contemporary.

The exhibition’s title comes from a statement made by Marilyn Monroe to her make-up artist Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder. If she died before him, Monroe told Snyder, she wanted him to make up her corpse while it was still warm. A frivolous remark, perhaps, but the fact that she had the statement engraved on a money-clip gifted to Snyder likely signalled
Monroe’s own dark awareness of herself – or her image - as pure, disembodied capital.

It’s this perspective that informs While I’m Still Warm, where every photograph or cinematic frame is both a memory and a death mask and where the act of lming is simultaneously one of embalming. Fowler’s work toys with these analogies, the dark room achieving its ultimate form as the chapel of rest, where one’s image is polished and perfected before being projected back to the public for the last time.

It was a real chapel of rest, the Frank Campbell Funeral Home in New York, that provided the stimulus for the work Notable Burials. Visiting this place in the course of her work on Rudolph Valentino, Fowler was offered a list of their best-known cus- tomers. The work is on-going, (the list is vast) and the brooding, hooded sculptures we see here are a selection of those led under ‘B’. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yul Brynner and others march in procession like a host of Dante’s lost souls.

Intrigued as much by what fame obscures as by what it reveals and in a world where celebrity has consistently, and resurgently, been one of vaunting machismo, Fowler has constructed her most ambitious site speci c installation to date. The installation piece invites participants into a reconstructed inner sanctum of the macho, witnessing Marlon Brando taking a shower in preparation for his notorious performance in the 1951 lm of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Fowler also approaches similar taboos more directly. Every Girl Crazy, for instance, turns the techniques of cinema against themselves by montaging images of female stars eating into a scene that is both subversive and carnivalesque.

If works like Fowler’s large-scale montage piece Swansdown depict Hollywood culture in ruins, then elsewhere the artist revels in its magic. Brando’s shower situates the image in a space — a sepulchral, almost mystical space — while the works drawn from the series The Day Cary Came To Norwich respond to the cinematic image’s extraordinary mobility. In these works, Grant’s image oats on an immaculate white background, as if suspended in nothingness. The title, however, alludes to his actual visit to Norwich in 1918 — performing under his real name of Archie Leach — reminding us again of that fertile, yet sometimes noxious ssure between the private and the public that Fowler’s work prises open, revealing a territory where self and image become radically unbound.