CULTURE VULTURES Blog Review (18/02/2011)

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Spice Up Your Life
by Eleanor Snare

We don’t think that either of us could accurately predict what effect this exhibition would have on us. Both big Spice Girls fan in our yoof with our particular favourites – Geri, for Elly (naturally), and Sporty for Jess – this exhibition was at once utterly delightful and completely worrying. Jess unashamedly loved the Spice Girls when she was a youngun’, and for her walking into the exhibition was a little like stepping back a decade and a half.

The theme itself, ingeniously, has been expanded from just ‘the Spice Girls’, into a walk-through event where you choose either a Manager or Artist card at the beginning. Really, this is an exhibition about the music industry, about the manufacture of pop and Spice Girls-mania, and the cards you pick contain little, quite tongue-in-cheek questions for you to fill out as you explore the exhibition.

The sheer volume of stuff that has been collected over the years is astonishing. Aside from the maybe more obvious posters, CD editions, magazine covers and the like, also on show are some of the costumes the Girls wore for their stage shows. Mel B’s catsuits and Emma’s giant boots were there, and much of it custom made.

But this wasn’t just a “Spice Girls” exhibition. This was an homage to everything utterly rubbish about the 1990s. The first corridor you came to was all the magazine covers from the beginning to the end of the Spice Girls’ life. The way the girls’ faces change, the hair, the clothes: it brought back many memories of school, wearing your hair in a scrape back with two dangling bits down the side of the face even though you know it doesn’t suit you, because that was “the style”. Reliving some of those memories was an integral part of the exhibition. Geared towards interactivity, the exhibition has a dressing up area, an art table where you can design your own Spice Girl or album cover, and a karaoke stage to croon to rubbish music of the 90s or early 2000s.

There were two concepts that really stood out to us. Firstly, the collection of all the ephemera of the Spice Girls over the years, including after their split and subsequent solo careers, made very transparent just how manufactured the entire thing was. Shifts in personal image, calculated poses and quotations, rapid turnover of merchandise: when you’re a young gel hollering along to ‘Spice Up Your Life’, these things don’t really register. What was really sad was how much we bought into this. At the start of the exhibition they genuinely come across as likeable, normal girls. It’s only when you see fifty changing pictures of them in a row you realise just how choreographed even their photos are. They even had their own coloured pens to “tell them apart” for autographs. Although we’re used to the X Factor and Bieber-ites now, whose very existence is a long-game that has been planned, step by step, from the start, the Spice Girls really took the biscuit. They were the manufactured, shoddy pop starlets, who were dressed up like dollies and paraded around, who conquered the world. They laid the foundation for all the Britain’s Got Nowt Talent wannabes because they succeeded where so many others continue to fail.

Secondly, we were both shocked by the unadulterated fanaticism of this collector, Liz West. It’s something people often joke about, about keeping things in wrappers, vainly trawling eBay for that long-lost first pressing, but here it was, real as the nose on V. Beckham’s face (ha) and utterly, utterly bizarre. While both Jess and I owned some Spice Girls memorabilia – postcards, lollipops, kids’ stuff – the sheer volume of all these THINGS was astounding. A whole wall, entitled ‘Props Store’, was taken up with DVDs, videos, comics, books, electronics, dolls, sweets – all Spice Girls themed, and all in their original packaging. As Jess aptly put it: ‘Imagine pulling a guy, and then you bring him home to your flat, and then there’s this’. It’s an exposure of the young, feminine side of Comic Book Guy.

This isn’t a negative appraisal, however. In fact, there are a lot of obsessed fans out there whose collection of stamps, shrunken heads, Coronation tea-towels and the like, could make some incredibly interesting and surreal exhibitions. Maybe that’s the next step – send a call out to all those who collect, avidly and without stopping, the stuff of everyday life, and use it to show people things maybe they hadn’t realised before. This exhibition will be a trip down Memory Lane for some, and maybe with a sharp left turn down Honesty Drive for others.

Find out more about the exhibition on the Leeds City Museum website. The exhibition will be running for the foreseeable future. Find out more about the collection on Spice Girls Collection Online.