Fortunately, Marc Quinn’s latest exhibition at the White Cube provided me with some of the answers.
Marc is probably best known for his sculpture of a pregnant disable woman on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar, a gold statue of Kate Moss in yoga pose and casts of his head filled with several pints of his own blood has now created marble and bronze sculptures of real life characters who have undergone radical body changes, over two years in the making.
It’s a gloriously disturbing depiction of the truly ‘Weird’ out there in Modern Society, a debasement of the vainglorious efforts in sculpture of our former heroes of the Empire, dotted around our cities and towns and as far away from the Elgin Marbles as you are likely to get.
Each of the subjects sat for the artist which include: Pamela Anderson, Thomas “The Pregnant Man” Chelsea Charms, America’s premier ‘big bust entertainer’ (her breasts each weigh 26lbs), transsexual porn stars, Buck and Alannah and Dennis ‘Catman’ Avner -who has tattooed, surgically altered and whiskered his face to resemble a cat-he’s still a bloke who can’t get his panto mask off.
I was really taken with Buck and Alannah, posing like Adam and Eve, and Alannah (a man with huge breasts) giving it to Buck (a bearded woman with man’s body) doggy style on the floor. What a lovely couple! If I had the money I’d buy them up and put them in the garden (the bronzes that is), lurking in the shrubbery, none of your Henry Moore marble blobs for me.
Then there is Pamela Anderson or rather two Pamela’s in conjoined form, a beautifully detailed bronze as if the molten material had simply been poured over her posed figure in bra and panties and high heels, a remarkable work and quite exquisite, in a skanky kind of way.
All of this intimacy is somewhat spoilt by the pregnant man in giant form cradling his unborn child in his boxer shorts which would have been perfect as a scary exhibit for the dreadful Millenium Dome, but starts to unbalance this wonderful exhibition, along with the Michael Jackson marble heads that looked like they had fallen off a Disney parade.
However the series of flower paintings executed in beautifully reversed iridescent and fluorescent colour and the pallid white orchid sculptures in Hoxton Square, can’t fail but to polarise the sheer beauty and sexual ambiguity of the flowering plant and the altered state of the human forms exhibited and leaves me pondering how we are only just a bottle of hormones away from becoming all that we desire. This exhibition is a must see - now where’s my Kays catalogue, something floral I think?
Pretentious Modern Artist of The Month.
This month’s award goes to Susan Philipsz, shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.” Susan explores how sound defines architectural space, by singing her versions of Radiohead and Nirvana songs through the PA system of a bus garage and a branch of Tesco.”
No, this is not a joke, someone please pass the ball gag and I'll notch up for Arts sake
Words - Dave Cairns/ ZANI Media
The White Cube Hoxton Square
