Marcus Harvey’s ’sick, disgusting’ painting of Myra Hindley (1998)
A semiotic analysis by John A. Walker of Myra, an Art Design Publicity classic.
ADP magazine 2(3): Crackdown / Loonied out | Published 01 September 2010.
This article was previously published in Tate, the art magazine (14) in Spring 1998.
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Marcus Harvey. Portrait of Myra Hindley (1995).
In the mid-1960s Myra Hindley (born 1942), the subject of Marcus Harvey’s painting, was the notorious lover and accomplice of Ian Brady, the serial torturer and killer of children. They were known as the Moors Murderers because they buried their victims’ bodies on Saddleworth Moor in Yorkshire. The remains of one twelve-year-old victim have never been found. Myra Hindley is currently serving a life sentence in Durham prison. She is so reviled by the British public that it is unlikely she will ever be released. She attracts more hatred than Ian Brady because she betrayed the love a woman is supposed to have towards children and because she has campaigned to be released on the grounds that she is now a changed person.
Despite the fact that the murders took place more than 30 years ago, Myra Hindley is still an extremely sensitive subject for any artist to address. Marcus Harvey must have realised that a large-scale image of Myra Hindley would provoke a sensation in advance of, and during, the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in the autumn, hence the charges of cynical exploitation levelled against him. (The painting, entitled Myra, dates in fact from 1995.) Given the strongly negative responses to the work— protests outside Burlington House by relatives of Myra Hindley’s victims, vandalism of the painting itself, moral and aesthetic condemnations in the tabloid and quality press, and in art magazines, resignations of Royal Academicians—it is clear that it is a pictorial sign of considerable power and resonance. (Even Myra Hindley has written to the Guardian complaining about the painting.) In all the condemnation there has been little reflection upon, and analysis of, the sign itself. It is the claim of this article that the ideas of the American philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, in particular his three kinds of sign—index, icon and symbol—will help to clarify the way Marcus Harvey’s painting functions.
An indexical sign is one in which there is a direct, physical relationship between mark and meaning (the imprint of a foot in sand, for example); an iconic sign is one in which there is a resemblance between marks and a referent (a drawing of a dog); a symbolic sign is one in which there is an arbitrary or conventional relationship between a sign and its meaning (the White House, meaning not the building itself but the President of the United States). They can be distinguished from one another and considered in isolation, but can also occur in combination, in a superimposed manner.
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