ALICE: CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
Flinging a hedgehog across the Queen of Hearts’ croquet ground turns out to be strangely satisfying, says DAVID V BARRETT at the V&A’s new exhibition
Lewis Carroll’s two Alice
books were probably the first introduction for many of us to the weird and wonderful, to absurdity and contradiction, to the Other. The young Charles Dodgson’s headmaster wrote that the 12-year-old was “marvellously ingenious in replacing the ordinary inflexions of nouns and verbs… by… convenient forms of his own devising.” He thought this would soon pass; we can be grateful he was wrong. The Alice
books are a joy and a delight
– as is the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at London’s V&A museum.
It’s an exercise in surreality, though it starts conventionally enough, with dozens of very small original drawings for the Alice books, mainly by John Tenniel, but also by Carroll/Dodgson. Both were perfectionists; Carroll binned the entire first run of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
because they were poorly printed, and paid for a new edition.
This is an adult exhibition; a few exhibits in cases are aimed at children – a dodo skeleton, a clock, a chessboard – though nowhere near as many as at theV&A’s Winnie-the-Pooh
exhibition a few years ago. Here it’s more a case of a few things at child height, with “Things to do” and “Did you know...?” Kids will enjoy the exhibition – it’s bright and colourful and fun – but it’s not really designed for them.
Although there have been more recent interpretations by artists from Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí to Ralph Steadman to Gerald Scarfe, it’s Tenniel’s drawings that we will always associate with Alice. For the first book they took him two years to perfect, and he drew inspiration from the “real”
Photograph of the ‘real’ Alice Liddell, by Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘Pomona’, albumen print, 1872. RIGHT: Zenaida Yanowsky as
The Red Queen in Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at The Royal Ballet.
BELOW: The White Rabbit. An illustration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by John Tenniel, 1865.
Alice, Alice Liddell. The little girl who prompted the books became a strong-minded and adventurous woman. At 19 she went on the Grand Tour with her sisters, making sketches around Europe for their tutor, John Ruskin, to assess. She hung out with Bohemians on the Isle of Wight, she met QueenVictoria and she married a wealthy cricketer, Reginald Hargreaves. She stares out at us, disconcertingly, knowingly, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1872 photograph.
Alice kept in touch with Dodgson until his death in 1898. As an elderly but stately lady in 1932, two years before her own death, she travelled to the USA on a muchpublicised trip to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Dodgson’s birth – and to be awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Columbia University.
Alice has been endlessly reinterpreted by other artists in other media; the first stage version was in 1876, and the books were adapted into an operetta in 1886. The exhibition has a multitude of posters and extracts from films; the first film adaptation was as early as 1903, a 10-minute silent movie with trick photography to show Alice shrinking and changing shape. There is, of course, a series of distorting mirrors in the exhibition.
There’s plenty of visual distortion. One room features a grinning Cheshire Cat – or a Cheshire Cat’s grin – above a truly disorientating swirly floor that could have been painted by Bridget Riley. Artists of all styles have been entranced and inspired by Alice; in 1924 André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, said: “everyone has the power to accompany an ever more beautiful Alice to Wonderland.” In another medium, Jefferson Airplane recorded a hippie classic with “White Rabbit” in 1967; there’s film of them performing it, though it could have done with being larger and higher quality.
We have Alice in political metaphor (Boris Johnson was depicted as the White Rabbit with the title “Alice in Blunderland” in a cartoon in the Times earlier this year); Alice on TV (Jonathan Miller’s Christmas 1966 BBC production, with Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter and Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts); Alice in fashion (the Alice band – and wonderful outfits for many of the characters); and perhaps most of all the concept of being Alice, in our curiosity, our independence, our desire to view things differently.
About the hedgehogs, and viewing things differently… Don a Covid-safe headset, and you’re taken to the Queen of Hearts’
croquet match. A shallow bowl in front of you holds a couple of hedgehogs; reach in, grab one, and throw it as far as you can
– it’s wonderfully therapeutic! The hedgehog even returns and hops back in the dish, ready to be flung again. There are flamingos to your side, which really you should be using as croquet mallets, but they’re not doing much except being skittery; I asked theV&A person who had overseen theVR display, and she said, with some disappointment, that they had tried, but just couldn’t get the graphics right. One word of advice: make sure you focus the headset carefully before you start; there’s nothing worse than a blurry hedgehog...
Perhaps the most stunning piece in the exhibition has a figure in a feathered dress standing within a moving sculpture of discs on spindles, rotating around a circular frame – the Infinity Dress and the Omniverse sculpture by Iris van Herpen and Anthony Howe. Van Herpen had been inspired by her visits to CERN in Switzerland, which has an ALICE Project of its own, A Large Ion Collider Experiment. As the catalogue says: “Alice’s journey into Wonderland is also used as a metaphor for the scientists’ own journey to discover more about our universe.”
The final room is the most disturbing of all, and probably needs a warning for people prone to epileptic episodes. Mirrors, flashing lights and streams of text surround you as you wander through it.
The book, like the exhibition, is bright and cheerful and fun, starting with a colourful 60-page reimagining of the Alice story by artist Kristjana S Williams. It’s more a companion volume than a conventional catalogue of the exhibition; there are lots of posters and stills from both stage and screen productions and (this being theV&A) many costumes as well. For two more new books on Alice, see p65.
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until 31 December.