All About Love
Words by Iris Beck
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
In the recent months preparing for the opening of ‘The Practice of Love’ at Norman Rea Gallery, before I could provide people with its title and context, I would occasionally–and entirely unsurprisingly–find myself questioned by others as to what this exhibition was about. “It’s about love,” I would answer plainly and a little unsurely, hesitating to add an ‘actually’ at the end in case somebody brought up my least favourite Christmas film of all time. At first, even though I answered with an entirely true statement, this description didn’t quite feel adequate enough to encompass all that I wanted this exhibition to embody. Yes, it is about love, and I definitely wanted to display some beautiful artworks about people kissing (perhaps best seen in the spectacular ‘Kissing Cups’ by featured artist Yunjie Huang). But I also felt like rambling fanatically, “It’s about love … but it’s also about feminism! And liberation! And reformation! And power!” I wasn’t sure if I could quite convey all those connections with what felt like a very simple word. But then I would remind myself that the ways in which ‘love’ has been simpled, reduced and devalued in our present culture of disaffection was actually the entire point of the project. I would return for guidance to a text that had come to exist as one of my personal philosophical lifelines and arguably the most formative inspiration for all aspects of this exhibition, All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks.
Sola Olulode, ‘First Kiss’, 2022, mural outside of the Southbank Centre, London
One of the most fundamental ways in which hooks seeks to challenge the cultural devaluation of love is to question how society regards what love actually is. She argues that love is often described purely as an emotion or feeling that occurs spontaneously, and thus taken less seriously in both its impact and the depth of consciousness it involves. Whilst love frequently feels instinctual and uncontrollable, there remains a question as to whether we can truly love someone without actively seeking to nurture theirs and one’s own personhood. Instead, hooks advocates for the idea that love should be an action beyond emotional investment; requiring choice, intention, and willpower.
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients–care, affection, recognition, respect,
commitment and trust, as well as open and honest communication.”
The idea that truly loving or opening oneself up to love requires energy and consciousness is an intimidating prospect. After all, so many aspects of the culture seek to distort and debase the genuine power of connection and empathy. Patriarchy has rarely rewarded men for emotional vulnerability in their masculinity; many feminist thinkers have argued that there exists some dynamic of a sociological wage gap in the emotional labour between men and women, wherein women have been socially accustomed to endure imbalances in the love that they give and receive. Love has also not been made to fit into our current existence of capitalist work ethics, which frequently requires moral distancing and a tendency towards individualism over community. When an awareness of the rest of the world is unaccompanied by the social changes of love and care, and to witness suffering and injustice becomes desensitised, it is unsurprising that audiences can find themselves falling into viewership of apathy and alienation. Above all, it seems we do not exist in a culture that rewards or reinforces affection. Throughout this exhibition, I have frequently found myself in conversations with friends and colleagues who find themselves disillusioned with the idea of love; whether it be the social norms of ‘situationships’, or that there is power in nonchalance and disaffection, and weakness in care and feelings. With such great risks and apparently thankless efforts in choosing love, it is unsurprising that we all seem to find it so difficult. hooks writes:
“Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.”
Print book of All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks spotted at ‘Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London
And yet, these critiques and confrontations of a society that lacks love did not lead me into despair and pessimism; perhaps because hooks’s teachings are ultimately ones of hope and liberation. Her writing doesn’t just focus on romantic love, but encompasses spheres of the familial, platonic, social and self. She considers what it means to actively practice love in relation to childhood, transgenerational experiences, grief, power, spirituality, honesty, and healing from traumatic events. Her work is neither surface-level pop psychology nor densely theoretical preaching; she seamlessly blends reflections on lived experiences with her social observations, with an infectious understanding that the person is always political, and love is a site for radical resistance when rooted in equity and social care. Above all, she imparts the idea that when we place love at the center of society and our own self ethics, we invite the potential for emotional liberation from the things that weigh us down the heaviest. ‘The Practice of Love’ at Norman Rea Gallery was formed out of this same conscious effort to reinstate and redefine the cultural value of love in our lives. Our curatorial team sought to reclaim images of love to challenge these cynical social tendencies to disaffection.
Mickalene Thomas, ‘Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)’, 2009, rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on
wood panel, image taken at Hayward Gallery, London
On a recent University trip to the Southbank Centre, myself and a few others from this committee at Norman Rea were lucky enough to see ‘Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery. ‘The Practice of Love’ opening was only a few weeks away, and we had all been hard at work compiling our exhibition’s programme and planning curation for all the wonderful artists we’d be working with. We could barely contain our excitement in discovering another exhibition that sought to be a part of a creative conversation on the radical capacity of love, even name-dropping our new favourite book in its title. Thomas’s image-making of love for the Black identity was a beautifully consuming and deeply immersive experience, full of joy and an absolute lust for life. We lost ourselves in the bedazzling rhinestone murals and intimate domestic installations, where so much creativity had been borne out of a conscious practice of love. It then felt incredibly special for us to then come together and try to put together a space of our own radical love; which we found not only in our curatorial passions and enthusiasm for the artworks we wanted to display, but also in how it felt to do our work as a collective and all the connections we have formed through that. As ‘The Practice of Love’ begins to draw to its conclusion as an exhibition, I now personally find so much strength and contentment in telling people that it was, in fact, “all about love”, knowing the radical and transformative capacity that love can possess.
