14 ★ FTWeekend 2 November/3 November 2019The ties
that bind
Elizabeth Price The Turner Prize-winning artist| on
her Manchester show, her former life in popand why
she still feels like an imposter in film.By Caroline Roux
Arts
peopledied.It’sneverbeenshowninthe
citybefore.
“The greatest test of this piece is how
it plays out here, because the greatest
number of people who experienced it
are here,” says Price. “I imagine there
will be debate about it, especially as
there’s been [the Grenfell Tower fire]
since. Following the fire at Woolworth’s,
public safety standards changed, but it
didn’t extend to the domestic realm,
and if it had, things might have been dif-
ferent at Grenfell.” The day before the
show’s opening, when I meet Price,
localsarealreadywanderingaroundthe
building asking where “the Manchester
video”is.
But viewers will have to be patient
because the work unites a strange series
of things, beginning with a seven-
minute exploration into the architec-
tural structure of the traditional gothic
cathedralchoir(hencethe“choir”ofthe
title), sliding into footage of the girl
group the Shangri-Las, and finally
alighting on the fire, as people recall the
horror of the event. What unites the
three is a hand gesture — a flick of the
right wrist. “I remembered it — the
womanpointinguptothewindowofthe
building,” says Price, who would have
been 13 when the event occurred. Then
she recognised it in the sculptures that
lie on the floor of the choir, and the
dance moves of the Shangri-Las. “It
seems to have the potential to express
something,”shesays.
It’s perhaps no surprisethatthe
cathedral appears in her work, or thatthe two architectural interventions she
has made here are minimalist rood
screens, painted a warm grey. Price
describes herself as “profoundly ex-
Catholic”, but she used to sing in the
choir, and there’s surely something of
that dogma in the ritual and repetition
that runs through her work. “I think the
link is broken, but my films are cultur-
ally Catholic, though not ideologically,”
she says. “There are austere moments,
but there’s transformative reverie and
aesthetic pleasure. And I do have a
deep love of religious art.” She says
she’d happily spend hours looking at a
Cranachpainting.
Inthefinalroomare25framedworks,
where single letters are barely discerni-
ble in grounds of delicately wrinkled
black tissue paper. They spell out a
sequence of words — Inky Spit, Floppy
Disq, Vox Gerl — in a specially designed
typeface that recalls the look of early
computer writing and perhaps evokes
her interest in linking the material and
digital. Language is an almost continual
presence in her work — sometimes, as
here, readable phoneticallybut pecu-
liarlyspelt.
You could say that these latest pieces
— deliveredafter a complex 10-day
process and remarkable for their pure
craftedness — aresomething ofa
metaphor for her films: exquisitely
made, hard to fathom. But for Price,
they were therapy too. “I usually spend
all my time in the dark,” she says. “And
this was a way to rediscover the tactile
and the causal. It actually stopped me
goingmad.”ToMarch1,whitworth.manchester.ac.uktan and tall figure walking, but this
time as a boy.
Girl or boy, the track is ne of theo
most recorded songs in history. Artists
such as Madonna, South Korean band
Shinee and Maroon 5 have sung it while
performing in Rio. “The Girl from
Ipanema” was also the first song 18-
year-old Amy Winehouse recorded
when she travelled to Miami to work
on her debut album,Frank.
But the song also came to be
associated with easy listening and
elevator music. Film-maker John
Landis turned it into a comic movie
trope by using the song in several
elevator scenes in his films.
Meanwhile, Helô became
something of a national star, joining
footballer Pelé as one of Brazil’s
goodwill ambassadors. But if “The
Girl from Ipanema” glorifies love and
beauty, the story of its making is as
tangled as a Brazilian soap opera.
Jobim did actually fall in love with the
girl, who rejected him repeatedly.
Even as a married man, he would joke
that he had only married his
wife Ana Lontra because she
looked like Helô.
In 2001, years after the two
composers had died, Helô was
sued for using the name “Garota
de Ipanema” for her clothing
boutique. The court eventually
ruled in her favour, confirming
Helô’s status as an icon. To this
day, the muse-turned-
businesswoman proclaims herself
the “eternal girl from Ipanema”
on her Instagram page.
Clara HernanzFor more in the series go to
t.com/life-of-a-songfT
hough “The Girl from
Ipanema” shot 24-year-old
Astrud Gilberto to
worldwide fame in 1964,
the Brazilian singer was
overshadowed by another figure in her
home country. Instead of idolising the
song’s performer, everyone in Rio de
Janeiro seemed to be obsessing over the
girl in the title. Who was “she”?
In 1965, the song’s co-writer Vinicius
de Moraes grew tired of the speculation
and all the women pretending to be
The Girl and held a press conference to
reveal his inspiration’s identity. Heloísa
Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, also called
Helô Pinheiro, lived on Montenegro
Street, near Ipanema beach. De Moraes
and his longtime collaborator, pianist
Antônio Carlos Jobim, often gawked at
her from the Veloso bar as she ran
errands for her parents.
At the time, the pair were working
together on a musical comedy and
wrote “Menina que Passa” (“The Girl
Who Passes By”), a song about a lonely
Martian who lands in Rio in the midst
of carnival and marvels at the beauty
of a young woman. At his press
conference, De Moraes explained that
Helô’s hip-swing defied “spatial
geometry” and escaped “even
Einstein’s grasp”. She was “a golden
teenage girl, a mixture of flower and
mermaid, full of light and grace, thesight of whom is also sad,
in that she carries with her, on her
route to the sea, the feeling of youth
that fades, of the beauty that is not
ours alone.”
Today, De Moraes’s description comes
across as creepy — he was nearly 50, she
was a teenager. But back in the 1960s,
Helô’s hip-swing helped popularise
Brazilian music across the world.
While Jobim and De Moraes’s
extraterrestrial musical comedy never
took off, “Menina que Passa” was
recorded in 1962 by Brazilian singer
Pery Ribeiro under the title “Garota de
Ipanema” (“Girl from Ipanema”). In
1963 Jobim teamed up with guitarist
and singer João Gilberto (who died
earlier this year) and sax man Stan
Getz in New York to record an album,
which included the now-retitled “The
Girl from Ipanema”.
The full-length album version of the
song opens with Gilberto strumming
his guitar and singing in Portuguese;
then comes a verse in English written
by Norman Gimbel and sung by João
Gilberto’s then wife, Astrud Gilberto.
She had never sung professionally
before, but it was her untrained,
beguiling voice that made the song
(along with Getz’s breathy sax solo).
A shortened version of the song,
featuring only Astrud’s voice, was
released as a single and was a
worldwide hit, and came to define
an entire genre, bossa nova,
blending Brazilian samba with jazz
and blues.
By the time the song won the
Grammy Award for Record of the
Year in 1965, bossa nova was in
decline in Brazil. The light,
frivolous sound was eclipsed by more
politically charged tropicalia musicAstrud Gilberto in
New York, 1964 —Getty ImagesTHE LIFE
OF A SONG
THE GIRL FROM
IPANEMA
that responded to the country’s slide
into dictatorship.
In the US, however, bossa nova
appealed to jazz singers such as Frank
Sinatra who, when he recorded the
song as a duet with Jobim, said he
had not “sung so soft since [he] had
the laryngitis”. Ella Fitzgerald, and
Nancy Wilson before her, also sent theFT Culture Call podcast
Listen to our interview with the US artistMark Bradford taft.com/culture-callE
lizabeth Price isn’t the sort of
artist who lets you do your
own thing. From the entry to
her retrospectiveA Long
Memory, which opened last
weekend at the Whitworth Art Gallery
in Manchester, her guidance is keenly
felt. First she takes you through a
sequence of black and white images of
tongues and vessels,then into darkened
rooms on either side of this decidedly
nave-like space. In each are three
screens on which videos play, one bytakeseveralyearstocomplete.
“Idon’tgiveaflyingf**kabouttheart
market, or the ‘art world’,” she laughs.
Her thing is complex investigations of
social histories through woven-together
strands of archival imagery, newly shot
material, existing texts, stories and
music she writes erselfh , and choruses
ofrealandsyntheticvoices.
In one work, “Kohl”, shown across
four jewel-coloured screens, she details
the decline ofthemining ndustryi.
Another, “Felt Tip”, touches on the
emancipating effect of technology on
working-class men in the 1970s,seen
through the medium of patterns on
men’sties(shehascollectedabout200).
It’s hard reconcile the artist withto
her previous life as a singer in a 1980s
indie band, when as one of Talulah
Gosh, and then The Carousel, she
squeezed out messy breathy
two-minute songs about beatnik boys
and girls with strawberry hair.She’s still invested in what she calls “the
profound things that go into pop”,
thoughher dense videosare more like
concept albums. “I think they’re like
musicals,” she says, “suddenly songs
burstout.”
While film nowdominates her artistic
output, it wasn’t an inevitability. “I only
started making video in the mid-
2000s,” she says. “I come out of sculp-
ture and an interest in the ready-made.
In fact, I don’t think of my work as part
of the history of the moving image at all.
I feel like an imposter there. It’s more
relatedtothehistoryofpublishing.”
The work that will garner most atten-
tion at the Whitworth, and the one that
snaffled her that Turner Prize, is a
single-channel 20-minute piece called
“The Woolworth’s Choir of 1979”. It
includesfootagefromtheaftermathofa
devastating blaze that broke out in the
furniture department of a Woolworth’s
store in Manchester in 1979, in which 10‘The Woolworth’s Choir’
includes footage from after
the 1979 Manchester blaze,in which 10 people died
Elizabeth Price, photographed for the FT at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, by Saesha Blue Ward.
Top left: stills from Price’s ‘Felt Tip’ (2018), a two-channel video projection. Below: on stage in 1986— Steve Double/Camera Pressone, in a set order. “The best way to
experiencethemisfromthebeginning,”
shesays.“Iftheywererunningonaloop,
youmightnotgetthat.”
Price herself is funny and frank, yet
she makeslayered work that doesn’t
give itself up easily. In 2012 she won the
Turner Prize, used her acceptance
speech as an opportunity to rail against
the devaluing of art education in
UK schools, then disappeared back into
her life of teaching, intensive
research and creatingvideos thatNOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201931/ - 17:04 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD14, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 14, 1