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ALice Hawkins has a unique way of dealing with the inappropriate interest of Jehovah’s Witnesses in seeking converts from door to door. The artist said: “He comes here every Thursday. “So I got mine Dolly Parton find out and explain to them that Dolly is where I find my belonging, and Dolly is where I find my faith.”
One might think he’s cheating, but it’s worth noting that Hawkins isn’t kidding. Parton had always been her favorite singer, but her obsession escalated after her friend’s suicide, which left Hawkins “disturbed”. To cheer her up, her husband asked her to go to Dollywood, the singer’s 150-acre theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. “I just felt like I found a spiritual place, like my mecca,” says the artist. “I found comfort, when we were going home, I told my husband, ‘I’m going to go back there and start working, I’m going to work. It just made me feel alive.”
She really came back, with a stylist, a hairdresser and “clothes that I have been buying for years that were Dollified, that I have never had the courage to wear, making my own films and films of myself wherever I feel the presence of Dolly”. She also traveled to Nashville and Parton’s home for photo shoots, dressed as her idol. “I plucked some leaves from the front of his garden and kept them.
He said the shrine – not just pages but photographs, memorabilia and an astonishing amount of human hair (“You can’t talk about Dolly Parton and forget the hair. I’ve kept the hair extensions I’ve worn when I’ve dressed as Dolly”) – is about to be displayed as part of an exhibition at London’s Somerset House called Holy Pop. It will share the image space with other temples: the cabinet of things related to the Prince; the work of a Spice Girls collector who was diligent enough to keep not only the magazines and photos but also the cans of soft drinks that the girl group endorsed; a George Michael painting featuring a religious icon with the singer’s face where a saint should be, and a photo of his old haunt on Hampstead Heath with the caption: “I’M GOING TO THE FUCK TREE.
There are films and photos of fans visiting the star’s graves, as well as memorials dedicated to everyone from Nelson Mandela to former One Direction singer Liam Payne. Visual art – a painting by Graham Dolphin of a graffiti-covered headstone from the grave of Doors frontman Jim Morrison; a collection of artifacts from graffiti artist Tox26 – jostles for space and collections, including a Marc Bolan fans are very dedicated to remembering the singer who has a branch of a fig tree where Bolan’s car fell in 1977, killing him instantly.
Walking around the show is funny, moving and sometimes confusing. It is also encouraging to anyone who has been very interested in an artist who is ridiculed as childish or sad, or – to quote his words – when forced to discuss for a long time with a friend that if the weight of their writings could lead to the destruction of their house, and if the collection should be done in the future.
This, according to the manager Tory Turk, is part of the policy. Saint Pop was inspired by his work on other pop culture shows. “Because of things like David Bowie Is (the spectacular 2013 exhibition that became the most visited event in the history of the V&A), the group has come to feel that they are the people of popular culture, “he says. The curators are no longer experts: they are fans and curators of citizens. They will do the work for us in keeping things and being encyclopaedic.”
Holy Pop is yet another attempt to save the history of fandom. For a long time as a region of lost people, it has become more difficult in recent years: we live in an era of dangerous Internet users, who have shown a worrying tendency to show their commitment not only to collecting ephemera or following photographers on their travels but with cyberbullying or stalking.
“I’ve always thought that reinventing the concept of the collector, the enthusiast, is important,” says Turk. “Just messing up the story of a collector and a fan with crazy people.” In fact, being a hobbyist – and collecting things that to someone else may not have any real value – has a real psychological purpose.
It is the opinion expressed by Athen Kardashian, half of the two artists Athen and Nina, whose work is full of cultures and tastes, including pieces called Cure words, installations where there are CDs, or references to High School Musical. Their Dreamgirl 2 is the first thing that visitors to Holy Pop see: old videos, makeup, Indian religious images and Bollywood images that are “a real mishmash of everything we were in growing up around, led by a crazy teenage bedroom that contained all these contradictory things”.
Kardashian adds: “Fandom is a natural expression of who you are and what you believe in – seeing someone who represents something about yourself and maybe revealing it. That commitment is so beautiful.”
From head to toe, it’s hard to escape the way the show combines culture and religion: the collection of so-called “holy places”; the idea that visiting an artist’s grave or David Bowie’s mural is a form of travel. One room is provided a piece of chewing gum by Nina Simone and rescued from the Royal Festival Hall stage by Warren Ellis, of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. It has already been cast in silver, turned into a sculpture and a piece of jewelry, and is the subject of Ellis’ 2021 book. Nina Simone’s effort.
Here it is shown as a sacred relic in a glass case, illuminated in some dark space. To some extent, it is absurd and tongue in cheek; on the other, there is a big point: that fandom fills the gap between many people “due to commitment and faith in something big and good”, as Kardashian says.
Of course, it’s amazing how much fandom is shown to be centered around dealing with loss. Artist Dandy Day’s exhibit is a cookie jar in the form of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine: he used to have the ashes of his mother, who died when Day was 19. “She messed with my brain with the Beatles in the best way,” says Day. “He was always in the car and in the house. His brother died when he was a teenager – and he introduced him to them.” Careless or not, I feel like playing their music was his way of letting me grieve. I grew up knowing that his love of the Beatles came from a lost place. I think I just picked him up when he passed. in agreement.”
Perhaps the loss of the exhibition brings the whole show: as Turk says, the kind of collection shown in Holy Pop may die in a world where the preferences are increasingly online, without physical goods. A man named Turk said: “When you have something, you take it seriously.”
Nina Mhach Durban from Athens and Nina agrees. “You used to cover your wall in concert tickets, and now you don’t have ephemera. Maybe our artistic practice is trying to stick to it. There is something about looking for these things, like a treasure hunt. Athen and I really enjoy searching eBay for these things that we use, finding old Britney Spears tapes and VHS videos available, because they are read again. dying in many ways, but it also allows us to have this practice, the search and there is something sacred in that practice, hunting things.”
