Whose Frida (and the Big Bad Wolf)?

Nothing is more annoying than when everyone else catches onto something you thought you discovered first. Or anyway, something that I thought I’d discovered first. You may not feel the same — for example, you may have discovered this column, and be more than willing to circulate its URL to your friends, relatives, phone company, pets, and influential journalists/agents/publishers/sugar mamas. Please do not let my embrace of obscurity, hermit-like temper, and general gnarliness with the populace stop you. Really, I’d be thrilled — like I was thrilled that the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s life work (her first ever solo show in Britain) was packing them in this Monday afternoon.

Yes, you read aright. On a sunny Monday afternoon, hundreds of people took time out from their British lives of reading tabloids, drinking beer, and yelling into their cellphones aboard crowded trains, to crowd a series of rooms in an old power station on London’s riverbank. Tate Modern is universally acknowledged as the museum world’s top success story — a hugely ambitious architectural conversion that showcases a collection of Modernist (read ‘difficult’) and postmodern (read ‘obscure and/or featuring willies’) art. It’s the world’s first Field of Dreams gallery — they built it, and people came. Boy, did they ever. It’s always been busy, every time I’ve swept down into the Turbine Hall or soared up through the glassy layers.

There’s something, though, about Frida, that compels the hoards. Is it her tragic life story? Is it the Hollywood biopic of her tragic life story? Is it that she died young, and you can fit her entire oeuvre (juvenilia and photographs included) into a long afternoon? Or is it that she has become so much more than an artist — a feminist icon, an earlier postcolonial ironist, a spiritual leader, a spangled handbag? Where once only art students and avid, lonely teenagers (comme moi) pored over Frida’s art, bleeding for her, reading every detail of her vivid diaries, now she’s high street fashionable, her Mexicanidad a perfect complement to this summer’s Boho look (don’t worry, it will reach Toronto in a couple of years).

Going to the exhibition was like having my teenage diaries made public (although my diaries contained far fewer screaming babies). Same with the Tori Amos concert in Berlin last week, although wisely she avoided all the songs from the Little Earthquakes era that belong only to me and make me cry when she shares them with others. So yes, it was amazing to see the paintings up close and intimate, and especially to see her early sketches, and several paintings that don’t fit so well into the tragic artist/obsessive narcissist myth that most Frida books peddle, like her tremendous synthesis of world history, "Moses." And it was certainly interesting to stand between two teenage male art students nervously brandishing their sketchbooks at "My Birth," in which the artist’s head is shown emerging from the vagina of a woman whose torso and head are covered in a sheet, in a graphic, alarming, tremendous yoking of birth and death. But.

I wanted her to myself. I wanted to dance and prowl in the wide spaces of the galleries, instead of inching from painting to painting in a snake of viewers, so slow that taking a stride felt like walking on the moon. I wanted music, colour, Frida. Our conversation was constantly interrupted by pretentious women in floaty outfits, or hordes of uniformed school kids who didn’t give a crap. It was like going to see a really fabulous, intense movie in a cinema where everyone is walking around and talking. When I went to the Rebecca Horn exhibit last Friday night, it was pretty much just me (and some very bored looking guards), which added to the delicate eeriness of her sound installations, to the sense of a journey unfolding. Every so often a male voice (always) would waft pass, explaining things to a female companion (always). There’s no need for galleries to be libraries, but contemplation and engagement can’t really happen in a cattle run.

And when we were finally gouted out into the nineteenth hole, the gift shop, I saw plastic cases filled with Frida-inspired floral hairbands, brightly-coloured (and over-priced) Mexican jute bags — and people spending more time looking at merch than they had looking at the work. Heaped by the till, copies of Julie Taymor’s movie and its soundtrack. But where was Frida? Gone the way of the bad wolf (one of my favourite personal symbols), who — in a moment of astonishingly poor narrative cobbling — was revealed as an empty cipher in the final episode of Doctor Who. C’est ci n’est pas un loup. There is no wolf, and there was no Frida. I even looked in all the handbags, but she is — like the wolf — in danger of extinction by over-hunting.

Maybe everyone who looks at a picture takes away a little of its aura, until something like the Mona Lisa has none left. Maybe everyone who uses a symbol — like the black wolf that streaks across my belly — undermines its power to mean. In which case, I’m complicit in the very thing I hate. And worse than that, doing something everyone else is doing. So I shall have to cease forthwith — hand back all symbols, ignore all art and culture. But then that will become the cool, new thing and I’ll be back where I started. Except I’ll be wearing an orchid hairclip, just like Frida.

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