By Jude Jones
The pop culture icon has ambivalent place in the museological canon.
Which is verbose way to say: historical-artistic institutions – the Louvre, the MOMA, the London Victoria & Albert – scarcely find place for the likes of Rihanna, Madonna, or Elton John in their official archives or haughty halls. Indeed, the word “icon”, to their presumably dust-laden ears, evokes more antiquated images of the religious icon – medieval saint’s relics, wilting devotional images, emaciated carvings of Christ – than it ever does anybody within the contemporary mass-culture zeitgeist. As Derek Jarman said in his Modern Nature, it’s a “mind full of the Middle Ages.”
However, if Twitter stan culture has taught us anything (and, it has certainly taught us a lot), it is that the icon, and more specifically the Diva – so glamorous and so divinely feminine as she is (the post-exhibition giftshop is surprisingly well stocked with copies of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) – can become a digital-age deity of dizzying proportions as well, all necessary saint’s relics and devotional shrines uncannily included.
This is why the Victoria & Albert’s DIVA exhibition feels so refreshing. Enclosed within the perennial dusk of the museum’s costume galleries, one room over from a grand hall containing Raphael-painted tapestries intended for the Sistine Chapel, DIVA considers devotion in its most contemporary form: that is, “Diva Worship,” as one episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race would term it (a show which, inevitably, forms a cornerstone of the exhibition’s latter portion), our modern fascination, even quasi-religious obsession, with the diva figure.
This obsession is one that is naturally queer-coded. And the exhibition – presented in two audiovisual “acts” – is quick to make these linkages. Beginning in the nineteenth century, when the term diva (fittingly, the Italian word for “goddess”) was first used to describe operatic powerhouses of otherworldly talent like Donizetti Rossini and Adelina Pitta, we are introduced to the Victorian diva in her various forms, traversing from the opera house to the dance hall to the theatre stage along the way. During this crash course, we meet readily the forerunners of today’s queer icon: Vesta Tilley, whose drag-king crossdressing made her Britain’s highest earning lady by the end of the 1800s; the legendary French bohemian Sarah Bernhardt, whose lesbian revelries were all the hottest gossip of the time – the type Perez Hilton would have killed for.
As we are fed this introduction, the V&A knowingly reminds us that, like queerness, some form of “stan” culture has always been with us, the exhibition framing on the walls various cartes-de-visite, small photographic portraits of early celebrities like Pitta and Bernhardt, that diva devotees of their time would obsessively trade and collect. Some things, it seems, never change.
But from there we quickly watch how some things do, descending now into a glamorous silver-screen diva reliquary: gowns worn by Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland’s signature red dress for 1949’s Good Old Summertime. This era is where the modern diva was born: Judy of course, but also Marilyn Munroe, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Joan Crawford too. However, this birth is for both good and bad, the exhibition being careful to remind us of the recurrent criticism, exploitation, and tragedy to which they all became subject as eccentric, assertive women in the public spotlight. To these ladies, still so celebrated in queer circles, “diva” was no longer the goddess-compliment it might have been in Victorian times. Instead it was made a weapon, ridiculing them for daring to be leading ladies in all aspects of life. Crawford’s tumultuous exile from Hollywood offers just one of many tragic examples.
Ascending via a marble staircase to the exhibition’s second “act”, the costumes hall explodes into technicolour: Bob Mackie masterpieces resplendent in Swarovski, Rihanna’s world-stopping “Heavenly Bodies” ensemble from the 2018 Met Gala; Grace Jones’s gender-bending body-playes. Here we interrogate the status of the diva in the here and now, in all its disparate forms: the bored rebellion of Siouxsie Sioux, the proud camp of Elton John, the civil rights statements of Aretha Franklin, and the ironic anti-diva of Annie Lennox. Some figures are naturally given more prominence than others. Rihanna forms the literal entryway to this diva’s domain, three of her most recognisable looks and an extended clip from her “Umbrella” music video greeting viewers from the go. Björk forms another, if unexpected, centrepiece of the room, an entire cabinet devoted to her weird musical otherworlds which, according to the exhibition guide, find inspiration in everything from “traditional Iceland chorus” and “fungi” to “techno beats and grief.”
However, some figures, although featured, feel excluded from the broader narrative. Hidden in one back section (that I was only able to find with help from a member of staff) is a brief footnote on SOPHIE and Arca, the latter only honoured with a reproduction of the album art for her kiCK iiiii release. These two trans pioneers, whose disruptive electronic soundscapes have helped to redefine both what it means to be queer and the bounds of “pop” over the last few years, become marginal elements to what feels an ultimately cis-gendered definition of divadom, despite all the hard work the exhibition does do elsewhere to highlight the queerness and diversity of our modern diva.
Perspectives from the global South feel minimised too. In another shadowed corner, one finds a single photograph of Priyanka Chopra, the polymath former Miss World often revered as one of the most influential women in the world, and Lata Mangeshkar, the “Nightingale of India” whose eight decades of work made her, according to Guinness at least, the most recorded artist in the world. Names such as Iranian movie star and singer Googoosh, whose career began in the ‘50s and is still selling out Madison Square Garden shows; the late Mex-American sensation Selena; and the five-Grammy-winning Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, titled by Time magazine “Africa’s premier diva,” felt some of the more glaring oversights.
However, that the likes of Arca or Mangeshkar have now found themselves in the annals of the museum archive are victories within themselves. Pointing out everyone who the exhibition missed would be exhausting and admittedly includes several heavy hitters from the Western canon, Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj included (sorry stan Twitter). Yet, the V&A still succeeds at bringing attention to a section of popular culture so often sidelined and ridiculed, despite the enduring role of the diva in almost everything, from what you listen to on the way to work to abortion rights and our understandings of gender. This is the power of the DIVA, and it is a power that the archive about time acknowledge.
DIVA is at the V&A, London, until 7 April 2024.
Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the managing editor of GAY45 and is an interdisciplinary student journalist, currently completing an undergraduate degree in History & French at the University of Cambridge. His writing – covering photography, nightlife, creative work, gallery reviews, interest pieces, and political comments – have also been published by Varsity, The Cambridge Language Collective, and DISRUPTION, among others. He is in his final year of studies and is hoping to move to Paris next year to pursue a postgraduate degree in History & Philosophy of Art.
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