Roman Polanski - Repulsion

Sarah Lucas, Artforum 50.10 (Summer 2012) Review

SITUATION

There's the briefest phase during early puberty when one's hapless ignorance of firsthand sex is combined with an obsessive curiosity for all its obscene details, weirdly accompanied by a childish revulsion toward the whole stinking business. This is that awkward age when the frankest of questions ("What is cunnilingus?") find their way to the dinner table, followed by the inevitable "Do you guys do it?" and the equally inevitable squeals of horror if even the most liberal of parents attempt a response. Terror and hilarity mix in fine proportion, fueling more queries, fits of laughter, and tactless curiosity, and quickly veering toward real knowledge thanks to the energies of some forgettable local teenager.

Sarah Lucas's sculptures - all cracks and bulges, surrogate cunts, nipples, tits, and dicks - seem to exist forever suspended in that fleeting preteen moment of wide-eyed initiation into the hideous delights of sex. Looping tubes of panty hose filled with pillow stuffing intertwine in ecstasy, their mottled surfaces able to suggest all at once fine marble, uncooked sausage, and dimpled thighs (NUD 27, 2012). Stuffed, boneless legs and clenched butts straddle chairs (Make Love, 2012), while a colony of nylon breasts (with alarmingly flimsy nipples provided by panty-hose tips) proliferate like a cancer over a bulbous hanging chair (MumMum, 2012). As seen in "Make Love" and "Miss Jumbo Savaloy," the first two of four back-to-back exhibitions at Situation, a yearlong project space devoted to Lucas's work (and located above Sadie Coles HQ), what makes Lucas's work extraordinary is the contradiction between the puerility of her subject matter and the sophistication of her sculptural language, so knowing about weights and counterweights, shadows and shades, solids and voids. She succeeds on the very terms of classical sculpture through her miraculous ability to animate lifeless matter with believably living energy. Lucas is remarkably attentive to surface quality and variation, from dimpled scrotumlike chicken skin, to the rough weightiness of cinder block, to the hardened plaster of a human-size missile suspended from the ceiling and painted the exact sickly pink color of dental cement, somehow suggesting both a giant dildo and a lifetime supply of tooth-rotting bubble gum. With its attached mechanical arm forever jerking off, Miss Jumbo Savaloy, 2004, creates an incessant, gentle rocking whose noise makes conversation difficult. But who cares? This is sex without talk.

The cheap double entendres (a lumpen cat composed solely of phallic and breastlike protuberances, hunched atop an ironing board, is titled Pussy, 2012) and sudden reversions to childhood (such as Tit Teddy #2, 2012, a grotesque panty-hose-and-stuffing toy, flopped and forgotten on a sill) return us again to the giggly, uneasy transition of early adolescence. Lucas's is a world where everything appears as yet another unwashed erogenous zone, a universe solely populated by phallic symbols and available mammaries, where sophomoric Freudian psychologizing can run amok. We are left forever wondering, with some embarrassment, whether it is our or the artist's dirty mind animating all the nylon, pillow stuffing, stretched T-shirts, and foodstuffs. Is it just me, or do those two fried eggs suspended above a raw chicken arse, all dangling from an abortion-serviceable wire hanger (in Untitled, 2012), look like that slut I saw you with last night? Lucas proves herself the most gifted British sculptor of her generation, her lightness of touch intact as her familiar language soars to virtuoso heights of confidence and inventiveness, with no end to the orgy in sight.

- Gilda Williams

Copyright Artforum Inc. Summer 2012

My Word

Gaity Humorous Beautiful Frivolity Delight Fun Simple Attractive Absurdity Authority Openess 

Sensitive Perceptive Liberated Intimate ResistantSeductive Vulnerable Unique Ordinary Sensual Taboo Forbidden Subversive Confronting Provocative Suggestive Flow Difference 

Contradiction Disceptive Uncensored Disinhibited Play Disguise Unique Passive Unorthodox

Iconoclastic Rebellious and Irreverent

COMPELLING

Having a powerful and irresistible effect

Inspiring conviction

Evoking interest, in a powerfully irresistible way

Hermaphrodite

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 6. 5 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"Hermaphroditos, as he has been called, who was born of Hermes and Aphrodite and received a name which is a combination of those of both his parents. Some say that this Hermaphroditos is a god and appears at certain times among men, and that he is born with a physical body which is a combination of that of a man and that of a woman, in that he has a body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man. But there are some who declare that such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities, and coming rarely into the world as they do they have the quality of presaging the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good."

Niki de Saint Phalle

MIke Kelley, Catholic Tastes

The male artist ( or criminal) - Kelley, that is - must partly disappear , becoming half man. But where did the other half go? In the furniture works, a narcicissitic circle developed in which Kelley is both woman and man, both subject and object of his own desire. As such, the works signal what Kelley has called leitmotif: "failed eroticism". pg 27

- handmade, colourful, over random configuration... replaces male energy with a female alternative... applied to fetishized objects of childhood and domesticity... pg 28

Kelley never appears in drag. Instead, he appropriates forms of domestic labor and production traditionally seen as the cultural property of women, bending gender in a more complex and confusing way.  Kelley charts the parameters of powerlessness, chronicling the fears and insecurities around which we build our fortified identity. pg 162

Of corse dolls are mostly adult fabrications to begin with, expressing and adult ideal: the child as a cuddly and sterile creature devoid of genitals, incapable of recalling the grown-ups guild over their own sexuality. Kelley's well fingered playmates deflate the dysfunctional idealization, returning us to the childhood scene where the doll is less a screen for a projected alter ego than  a tactile object to be sucked, squeezed, humped, and drooled on until its last erotic delights have been yielded and it has become literally filthy.
pg 165

Plush Kundalini and Chakra Set, 1987

Exhibited in an adult context where your no suppose to touch anything

Life always overtakes art..... Kelley relentless honesty and poetics of the body discovers an understanding of character that ultimately reveals the quality and possibility go of the human condition... pg 231

Mike Kelley Cathotlic Taste,  Elisabeth Sassman, Whitney Abrams 1994

Private Lives

Mike Kelley, City 00 (2007)

Parangole - Helio Oiticica

Rancier... New Left Review

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

Oiticica in London

I reread my texts: hermaphrodipotesis* is the one that affects me the most: it is the meaning of everything, creleisure included: sex does not exist as a concept ( the clothes are always made unisex: i make parangole clothing) - homo and hetero are the same and never existed as something real: they are the shadow cast by social oppression.
*referring to his own text of Jan 1969 'Discovery of the Hermaphrodipotesis" in which he wrote ...everyone should be self enchanted, as if in a hermaphrodite activity....Hermaphroditize your acts and you will be self-enchanted, and sexier, and have appetite for everything

pg 18, Oiticica In London, Guy Brett & Luciano Figueiroedo, Tate Publishing, 2007

Parangole Capes - capes of multi color an fabric...in exhibitions of Hélio’s work, which permitted the public to wear and explore them. Out of a plain three-metre length of fabric of bright colour ‘each person must build on the body a structure, uniting the edges and extremes with safety pins’. Oiticica stressed that each cape should be removable without disturbing the pins, so that it can be handed on to someone else, who will ‘wear’ it and activate it in a different way. He emphasised the desirability of participation by a heterogeneous public.
 
 In the 60's Hélio Oiticica created "Parangolé", a cape made of a colorful fabric that can have poems written on it or pictures. It can only be revealed through the gestures and movements of the person that wears it. Therefore, the spectator of this work becomes a participant and the "Parangolé" becomes a mobile sculpture.

Folkert de Jong Website

http://www.folkertdejong.org/06img.html

Folkert de Jong

August 29, 2012
galerie dukan hourdequin	Follow us
Folkert de Jong, Mr. and Mrs. Mackintosh.Polyurethane foam, wood, metal, spray paint.
Folkert de Jong The Immortals September 1–October 13, 2012 Opening: Saturday, September 8, 6pm galerie dukan hourdequin24 rue Pastourelle 75003 Paris, France www.dukanhourdequin.com	Share
galerie dukan hourdequin is pleased to present The Immortals, the first solo exhibition in France by Dutch artist Folkert de Jong (1972). This exhibition presented at galerie dukan hourdequin shows the project entitled The Immortals made by Folkert de Jong for the Mackintosh Museum/The Glasgow School of Art as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (20 April–7 May 2012). "The works collectively titled The Immortals represent a concentrate of a number of Folkert de Jong's themes. Invited by the Glasgow School of Art to exhibit in April 2012, he took as his starting point works by famed architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, originator of the School's building. Influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement, Mackintosh's creative world brought standardisation and a nostalgia for the artisanal together in an association of traditional techniques and the most advanced technology the late nineteenth century had to offer. De Jong shows the architect and his less celebrated artist wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh working in a simultaneously avant-garde and highly conservative Victorian setting. The title of the work is the Mackintoshes' name for the group—also known as The Four—they formed with Herbert McNair and Margaret's sister Frances. Folkert de Jong's groups are irritating: their face-pulling is joyful but it's also repulsive, and you can't tell if this is infantile bad behaviour or someone pushing the rules for statue-making to the extreme limit. You can, however, immediately spot who they're by, given the use of the artist's favourite material, Styrofoam (and its variant, polyurethane foam), whose frankly industrial look, gaudy colours and strictly chemical makeup situate the work firmly in the domain of the artificial. Used for insulation and for building Hollywood sets, extruded polystyrene possesses contradictory virtues: while easy to sculpt, it is only apparently fragile, with a rot-resistant composition that makes it more durable than wood. A lot of today's bronze sculptures are cast from initial polystyrene shapes, but de Jong has always avoided this additional, official-art step towards sanctification. Styrofoam was invented during the Second World War by Dow Chemical and is marketed in Europe by IG Farben, former producers of the infamous Zyklon B gas. Thus styrofoam has invisible links with monstrous episodes from recent history. The entire de Jong oeuvre is founded on this kind of undisguised contradiction, in which something seemingly temporary and light-hearted is in fact eternal and intimately related to destruction. The urge to communicate is one of the primary driving forces in de Jong's striving to extend the scope of his art and integrate it into life. He has no scruples about availing himself of seductive colours, working with exciting subject matter, caricaturing facial expressions and drawing on more popular forms like the theatre and the movies. His faces are always placed on the floor, with no base, and inhabit the same space as the viewer, who ends up involved in a kind of theatrical relationship with them. Despite their initial "gore" movie impression, his works focus systematically on historical events or established art masterpieces, speculating about issues like power, reputation, exploitation, morality and the human being's capacity for self-destruction. The history of sculpture is the history of commemoration, of the monument raised to mark a great battle or pay tribute to a king or a religious dignitary. This is why de Jong never treats his subjects gratuitously, and draws each work's raison d'être from its context. He carries out detailed research, then uses stereotypes rooted in a popular culture shared by his audience to set viewers thinking about how advertising, TV and so on influence us on a daily basis. Vivid as they may be, de Jong's groups always emanate an elusive melancholy. His carnival energy is often marked by decline and degradation: death lurks in these frozen, tar-spattered faces, and the use of contemporary materials contrasts with the implicit nostalgia of subjects lifted out of the past. All these paradoxes make the de Jong oeuvre a source of endless reflection: at once irritating and alluring, irreverent and cultivated, vulgar and sophisticated, it lies somewhere between the clangour of trashy statues and mute anguish, between contempt for his materials and delight in their use." –Extracted from the text of the catalogue written by Sébastien Gokalp, curator (April 2012).