Lewis Carroll, or rather the fictive world of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is firmly embedded in our culture. I am surprised no one has made a religion out of Alice. Perhaps they have.
She is also very much at large in Tate Liverpool. Here she is, here she isn’t: in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and in Jorge Luis Borges; in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, and in the surrealist works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel (writing in a brilliant, short catalogue essay), in Hamlet and Don Quixote, in Kafka, Homer and the Bible. The influence of Carroll’s creation can be found in sci-fi, detective fiction and philosophy, in pre-Raphaelite painting and in hard-arsed conceptualism. You can’t shake Alice off.
This is a peculiar show, both rich and thin at the same time. It fascinates and it bores, running from the original 1865 manuscript for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground to the neon signage of the late Jason Rhoades’s 2004 My Madinah: In Pursuit of My Ermitage with its brightly glowing euphemisms for the female sex. Trout Hole, Sugar Basket, Serpent Socket, say the dangling, jangling neons, and much besides. You go red-faced in the glow of them.
The Reverend Dodgson might not be amused by Rhoades, or by the smutty implication that Alice’s rabbit hole could have anything other than innocent connotations – although it is hard to avoid the thought that Dodgson might have been motivated by “a sublimated desire for a pre-pubescent child”, as Manguel puts it in his essay.
The show attempts a historical overview. There’s much to appeal to hardcore fans, with vitrine after vitrine filled with early editions, Alice biscuit tins, themed playing cards and crockery, playbills and ephemera of a merchandising industry that is as familiar today as it was novel in the 19th century. Alice was the Harry Potter of her day. Then there are all Dodgson’s photographs of the Liddell sisters, including the real Alice, and, as the show proceeds, more and more Alice-derived, inspired and related artworks. Many are curios rather than significant works. Many are horrible, and some are probably irrelevant or so minor as to be pointless.
The opening section of the exhibition is both creepy and tedious. All those images of grumpy little girls, whom Dodgson, a keen amateur photographer, entertained for the long exposures of his plates by telling them stories. It’s a surprise that none of his little sitters were carried off by diphtheria or any other prevalent Victorian childhood disease while they sat before his camera. Photography was also Dodgson’s calling card for his entry into the London art world, and he photographed many of the leading lights of his day, along with their children: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family; William Holman Hunt and his son Cyril; Sir John Everett Millais and his daughter Mary (who provided the model for Millais’s 1865 painting Waking, a mawkish and disturbing painting that has little Mary sitting bolt upright in bed, looking up at some unseen spot on the ceiling).
De Niro through the looking glass
Maybe there’s a Jason Rhoades neon up there. I expect Mary to start levitating at any moment, declaiming obscene gibberish in the manner of the possessed kid in The Exorcist. (In fact, The Exorcist wouldn’t have been a bad movie to include among the screened works here.) Robert De Niro performs his “Are you talkin’ to me?” routine from Taxi Driver in Douglas Gordon’s double-screen Through the Looking Glass, and people talk backwards in Gary Hill’s video, which merges Through the Looking-Glass and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Virginia Woolf said the Alice books weren’t for children. “They are the only books in which we become children,” she wrote. Though there is plenty that may delight children (Jan Švankmajer’s 1971 film Jabberwocky, for instance, or Bill Woodrow’s English Heritage – Humpty Fucking Dumpty sculpture, with its bomb-like Humpty up on a wall), it is the inner adult this show really panders to. Fiona Banner‘s Arsewoman in Wonderland, for example, is a poster describing an Alice-inspired porno movie in graphic detail, right down to the final cum-shot. Yayoi Kusama’s masked and naked performers, covered in polka-dot body paint, posed around the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in New York’s Central Park in a 1968 Happening, is weird enough to disturb anyone – as are Francesca Woodman’s 1972-5 black and white photographs, one of which has a lurking rabbit-headed man half-shadowed in a sunlit doorway. Better to turn to Kiki Smith’s 2000-2003 intaglio etchings based on Dodgson’s own illustrations to Alice, beautiful bestiaries of birds and animals swimming through Alice’s Pool of Tears.
In the 1960s Alice became a doped-up, hippy-trippy pin-up. Adrian Piper, a conceptual artist and philosopher, made a number of LSD-inspired psychedelic paintings in the late 60s, some while still in high school, which as well as having a consummate period flavour are zingy and eye-chewing enough to bring on a flashback even if you’ve never dropped a tab. Peter Blake’s illustrations to Through the Looking Glass have real graphic distinction, but there’s something nasty about Graham Ovenden’s Alice screenprints of young girls in soft-focus glow. Yuck is the only fit response. What’s missing here – although it appears in the catalogue – is Sigmar Polke’s 1971 painting derived from Sir John Tenniel’s illustration of Carroll’s hookah-smoking caterpillar. Another work I sorely miss is a David Shrigley photograph of a bottle left on a garden step, with a handwritten DRINK ME label; it appears to be filled with stale urine. Shrigley and Polke would have given the show a boost. Maybe Tate couldn’t get the loans.
What they did get is a lot of minor stuff, including a lot of secondary 1930s English surrealism (excepting the great Leonora Carrington), alongside the Ernsts and Dalís, none of which are quite as surreal and strange as the original Alice. Conceptual artists from Marcel Broodthaers to Joseph Kosuth played with Alice, too, not always to great effect, and it seems to me that Lewis Carroll was even more conceptually rigorous, playful and thought-provoking – let alone surreal – than almost any artist who pays homage to him. This is the show’s lesson: somehow the books stand above their author and those who are inspired by them. Their fictive world has become so ubiquitous that almost anything can be seen in relation to it: anything featuring a mirror, an uncanny twist, anything with a child lost in a seemingly incomprehensible adult world, anything that bends logic, or time and space. All roads lead to Wonderland, even if some are not worth taking.
