ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW
Luminous Works
22.10.2013 -
07.12.2013
ALINA, PLEASE SHOW US THAT
SEX WE’D RATHER NOT SEE!
The basic principle,
the Tartuffe principle, we can call it (Molière’s Tartuffe, but not
only), endures through the ages and across cultures (Femens in every land, the
job has still to be done!): “Cover that breast I cannot bear to see!” Sex, as
we know, has a bad reputation. When explicit it is terrible, dirty or nasty! So
leave it to the pornographer and his vile deeds! When more suggestive,
half-hearted (or through pursed lips, so to speak), it fares better with the
upholders of good taste, but then of course it butters no parsnips. Not that
artists have refrained from representing it, and sometimes in the most brutal
fashion (from Courbet to Nauman, via Picasso, Man Ray, Molinier, Louise
Bourgeois or Lebel), with or without “delectation” for the beholder, as Duchamp
used to say. But clearly, like an artistic equivalent of the top shelf, it is
clear that these pieces are “curiosities,” minor works even when
major-format. Fémininmasculin, the exhibition conceived for the Pompidou
Centre fifteen years ago by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Bernard Marcadé, showed,
however, that sex was neither secondary nor scabrous, but intimately bound up
(excuse the expression!) with the process of art itself. That in fact it
expressed more than it revealed through forms whose representation in itself is
pretty much an open and shut case: that it cast light on creation from within,
we might say. At the time, I regretted and was above all astonished that Alina
Szapocznikow did not feature in what was and remains a milestone in the French
approach to “gender.” I was particularly aware of her resin sculptures
combining an erect male sex, a breast and mouth, producing a sensation close to
what (borrowing from Freud) Mike Kelley called The Uncanny. Elsewhere –
excuse me if I quote myself — I wrote that these sculptures “take on a
perverse, erotic and venomous beauty — a Fleurs du Mal side – in an
aesthetic vein imbued with a very fin-de-siècle hallucinatory quality [...] but
revisited by a deceptively fresh Pop culture. For example, the illuminated
mouths may tend towards a flourishing decorative beauty in stunningly beautiful
barley-sugar colours, but they are no less infused with anxious, caustic
humour, a bit like the carnivorous plant in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of
Horrors, which is fed with bits of human bodies (a hand, a foot).
Szapocznikow exploits the ambiguity of intimacy, of desire and disgust, of
formlessness and the elusiveness of life. The tart tones, gelatinous
transparency or opacity of polystyrene, polyurethane or wax materialise a
transorganic fluidity which, like the sleep of reason, brings forth seductive
monsters in the form of agglutinated breasts, eternally smiling mouths, plump
bellies.”1 At the time I omitted – simply because I didn’t think to do so –
to point out that these sculptures “lit up”: literally, and in the expected way
(most are entitled Mouth or Buttock Lamps or Sculpture-Lamp) but also, more
subtly, because they cast a sharp light on the obscurantism that still
doggedly dominates our world. Alina, please show us again that sex we’d rather
not see!
Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux
1. Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux,
“Alina Forever” in Twist Tropiques, Paris: Editions Loevenbruck and
Yellow Now/Côté Arts, 2012.
Alina Szapocznikow, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Loevenbruck, Paris
http://www.loevenbruck.com/?id=szapocznikow&expo=2524&expo