Angel of Anarchy by Eileen Agar

She is dangerous, and she is waiting

Eileen Agar’s sculpture Angel of Anarchy, created in various versions between 1936-40, is a plaster cast head covered in found materials such as embroidered silk and sea shells. 

The reproduction doesn’t do it justice.  When I saw it at Tate Modern in London I was both fascinated and afraid.  The fear I felt was not of the object but of my uncomfortable response to it: I imagined breaking the glass, grabbing hold of the head and taking it to pieces.  Of course I didn’t!  But this fictional encounter recreates that impulse. 

I hope that if you ever get to see this amazing surrealist object, it will have a similarly dramatic impact on you. 

So, buckle up and get ready for the ride!

Angel of Anarchy by Eileen Agar, 1936-40

Beneath her swathes of silk and her feathers and beads, the angel of anarchy is grinning.  She is black-eyed, breathless and wild with dancing.  She turns and crashes like a seventh wave and her hair is thick with salty surf.  ‘Release yourself!’ she screams.  ‘Leave the stuffy hearthside and the dim, flickering screen and run, now, out into the dark street of night where the wind throws the arms of the trees up above their heads’.

She is the dance of life.  She is springing up suddenly, sprinting, turning little-girl cartwheels and throwing red paint over clean clothes.  She is a restless dash for new places, a reckless disregard for good behaviour.  She is not writing or thinking in sentences or planning or putting in applications.  She is screaming and grunting and shoving and shouting.  Scrambling, bending, climbing, galloping.  Kicking, hitting, and hurling stolen, hard green apples over the wall.

What is hidden is strong.  And frightening.  Shall I dare to unwind the fabric?  What, really, lies beneath?  Would I unleash a frenzy, a tarantella of unbridled energy?  Would it be like letting out a pharaoh’s curse as I unwound the bandages on her eyes and mouth?  Would she inhabit me, possess me with her spirit of daring?  Would her feral energy, untamed by politeness, explode my compliant citizenship and all my careful upbringing of ‘don’t’ ‘you mustn’t’ ‘you can’t’?

My fingers twitch as I imagine them reaching out to untie the sky-blue embroidered silk and releasing a seashell that falls with a clattering click.  Then the bead necklace would drop, the green and pink feathers would come away, as the black velvet slithered off, along with the crest it held in place.  Finally, the brown suede neck-covering would shuffle down into a heap with the rest.

What, then, would be left?  What would I be faced with?  My own death mask, perhaps?  Or the artist’s features combined with a representation of her lover’s face?

This supreme act of disobedience would cause the alarms to ring throughout the art gallery and heavy boots to run towards me as every other person stared in my direction, appalled.

What else can I do but turn away and leave?  But it’s too late now to pretend that I can be content with things as they are.  The force of her rebellion has infected me through all the layers of fabric and time that separate us.  She is a source of power, a battery pack of disobedience, difference and possibilities.

She is dangerous, and she is waiting.