No wonder Cortiñas, born in the Canary Islands, likes golden age-Hollywood: as the title above shows, she’s got a nice turn of phrase herself. This tiny exhibition of two- and three-dimensional collages has an airy, acerbic wittiness about it reminiscent of Bette Davis in ‘All About Eve’. This is not however one of the many films plundered for dialogue in the main work, a video called ‘Confessions With an Open Curtain’. The centrepiece takes shavings of famous scripts and patches them on to film clips mainly consisting of plush stage curtains and the backs of well-known blonde heads.
It’s not original but then originality isn’t the point of assemblage. Moving past the images, you get the sense that Cortiñas is more confused by the portrayal of the women in the media she has pillaged than she is angry. And she passes that confusion on to us: there’s a jaunty couple carrying a large dice, their eyes blacked out but her shapely thigh in full view; ‘VCR’, a glass plate and metal ball, like an ominous, unreflective eye; and a three-part piece that includes a china plate, a sinister felt rope and a Paramount film star whose identity is obscured by the salt cellar placed over her eye.
Davis and Barbara Stanwyck got peachy parts as intelligent women – albeit ones who had to make immense sacrifices never demanded of a man. But if the feminine ideal is silent beauty, it backfires spectacularly. Even Catherine Deneuve is hard to recognise when you can’t see her face – lose the soundtrack and she’s barely there at all, something which isn’t true of the films she starred in. Deprived of audio I’d take Buñuel or Truffaut every time which, I suppose, means that I’m opting for silent beauty even while I, like Davis, try to claim the last word. Awkward studies, indeed.
Nina Caplan