Celebrity squared
Alison Jackson inflates the cult of fame to absurdist levels in an opera exploring the lives we think we know, writes David Pollock
ASK Alison Jackson when she first knew celebrity was a “thing” and she points to one seismic moment in the history of gawping at people we don’t know in person: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Jackson has always been transfixed by those who live larger than life, but the passing of Diana brought something home.
“I wasn’t really interested in her at all until she died,” recalls Jackson, echoing what many might think, “because I couldn’t understand how she was so implanted in our collective psyche.
“We didn’t know her. We only knew her through media stories and pictures in the press. No one really knew her for real. She was a total media construct, packaged by PR machines, by herself, by us wanting her to be a star. I thought that was a really interesting phenomenon, the whole hysteria around her death.”
It’s celebrity which has made Jackson famous, although not in the way you might imagine. Raised in Hampshire and educated first in sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and then in photography at the Royal College of Art, both in London, her work has come to involve images of celebrities played by lookalikes in normal situations, almost always played up for comedy value. In 2003, the idea crossed over into her BBC series
Doubletake, followed by a number of specials for Channel 4, and now she’ll be producing a shortrun live opera based on the concept at Summerh
all during the Festival. Appropriately it’s named La
Trashiata.
It’s all light-hearted, absurdist satire, although the work which launched her – part of her Royal College of Art degree show – was made for controversy. Mental Images was in the candidly-posed, fake long-lens style she would become known for, and it depicted Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed as still alive and having had a mixedrace child.
It played upon the version that people imagined they knew, reinforcing the subliminal levels of gossip surrounding their deaths. The piece won her notoriety and she carried on creating work like it.
“It was the birth of celebrity magazines at that point, and British culture became like a huge celebrity mushroom,” she says. “Evergreen, longlasting celebrities sat alongside the new, transient celebrity. It became like a folk religion, a really important part of our lives whether you read the magazines or not. News wasn’t news any more, even the front covers of newspapers weren’t telling us the news. You couldn’t avoid celebrities if you wanted to.”
It’s this culture which Jackson has chosen to mock in her work, rather than the celebrities themselves.
“I just thought how ridiculous it was that we believed these constructed stories which are all filtered through someone else,” she says. “Some editor, or picture editor, decides they want a celebrity to put in their magazine or on the cover, so they choose from which pictures the PRs want to put out and, most interestingly, what pictures the celebrities themselves want out there.
“I wanted to confuse the fact that you couldn’t really tell what was real – whatever that means – and what was just a constructed sales pitch from newspapers who wanted to sell more copies.”
La Trashiata extends the idea into the more highbrow realm of opera, with 14 scenes depicting, for example, Prince Harry dancing with a stripper to the sound of Verdi’s La Traviata, the Queen on a day at the races backed by the William Tell Over
ture, and Madonna and Lady Gaga scrapping to the sound of Rossini’s Cat Fight. Choreography comes from Andy Turner, on occasion of Ballet Rambert, and the unseen singers are directed by music director Henry Bennett.
“I suppose I’m only interested in making work about celebrities who have a good story surrounding them,” says Jackson. “A-listers are always best as they are the most protected and therefore have the most myths surrounding them, like the Royal Family. We don’t know, for example, that the Queen is actually a great teller of jokes and a mimic, but she is. We want to know what they are like at home, but we never get to see the real them.”
Surely it will all burn out one day? “I don’t think it will,” she says. “We’re just going to have more types of celebrity, especially as now anyone can be star on the internet. It’s a whole new world of celebrity. Justin Bieber was created on the internet and even he’s old hat now. It will continue to grow and evolve.”
It’s a whole new world. Now anyone can be a star on the internet. It will continue to grow and evolve
Alison Jackson: A Story in the Public Domain (La Trashiata) is at Summerhall, 21-24 August. It will be broadcast live to 30 Odeon cinemas nationwide on 21 August and online via BBC Arts Online. www.alisonjackson.com