| art.description.project | The work was developed from the writing that I’m currently doing for my forthcoming artist’s book, Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast. This book uses the incessant, obsessive description and interpretation of a single sculpture from 1974 to explore the intertwined histories of eroticized and violent imagery in art. The book also employs different voices: that of a writer caught in the maze of his own formal, theoretical, art-historical and psychoanalytical research; of the woman who is shown in the original sculpture; and of the artist himself. This performance was the first public event at which I read excerpts from the book. I also played recorded excerpts (in the voice of the woman) spoken by a professional actor, and employed original archive news footage, shot by the BBC in 1972, of the Belfast bombing which inspired the sculpture. These elements were combined with a meta-narrative in which the overall structure of the book as a whole was described, always from within a performative frame. During the performance, I switch between the fictionalized writer, the woman, the artist, and my own description of the book as a project.
The research for this work, and for the book that it is derived from, deploys various interpretative frames which I have been investigating in recent years: the ‘cultural science’ of Aby Warburg and his followers, defining the ‘pathos formulae’ and visual and symbolic genealogy of the Renaissance; Georges Bataille’s provocative, challenging works on transgression, sovereignty, desire and death; multiple approaches to art writing in recent years; histories of gesture from, amongst others, Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin; feminist scholarship on the social history of the ‘artist’s model’; psychoanalytical explorations of the history of imagery of sexual violence, female disfigurement, and female covering / uncovering, as well as nexuses of desire, looking and power; studies of drapery in post-Renaissance art; and so on. The sheer multiplicity of avenues of research, as well as the variety of authorial voices – are used to produce a polyphony – or cacophony – of interpretative possibilities. Ultimately, the sculpture oscillates between them all, and the ‘movement’ that its formalist admirers of the 1970s described is revealed to be not so much literal or metaphorical as conceptual. It simultaneously compels its viewers’ attraction, and repulses them. It commands attention by presenting itself as ‘empathetic’, yet produces shame through the eroticism of its form. | sv |
