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STONE SKIN WOOD FLESH
by Joel Simpson
The rare “Venuses” at Angles-sur-l’Anglin (France) celebrate our bodies as the the miraculous source of procreation. The realism of these 14,000-year-old representations testify to an intelligence comparable to our own, speaking to us from a third of the way back to the origins of our physical bodies. The rock surface testifies to the passage of time since then. After photographing the original site, I have recreated this sculptural medium through projection of slides of rock and wood surfaces onto models, using a wide range of poses and angles, some also referencing Indian sculpture.
Thematically, these virtual sculptures, both tangible and imaginary, celebrate the age of our collective bodies, as well as the erotic forces through which nature has assured the continuity of the human line from the Paleolithic and beyond to the present day. The porous, fissured ancient rock and weathered wood also suggest a subtext of our physical kinship with the earth itself.
Most of the body projection images were made by projecting slides onto a model and making a single exposure. These create virtual "mobile" or portable sculpture. To make "parietal" or wall relief sculptures, I take the original image and reinsert it into a scan of the original slide, lining up the transitions as closely as possible.
New Photographs, February 2007
The new photographs, in which I clothe the subject in a fur coat, adds another level of framing to the body, one that is charged with cultural connotations. The rock sculptures become “rock Venuses in furs,” and the projections of details from antique Asian (mostly Indian) sculpture evoke Rilke’s “breathing of statues”—his capsule description of music.
But the images involving sculptural details evoke for me deeper questions regarding the ontological status of erotic desire. The idealized erotic object seems so real, so believable, yet it is a projection of culturally conditioned desire. These projections, featuring highly stylized decorative fragments from traditional Indian sculpture, are clearly artificial, so their believability throws a spotlight on our wish to believe in the object of our desire. If they were realistic they would lose their thematic force, because they would seem to prove the validity of the desire with an example from reality. Instead they use the tension between impossibility and believability to throw into relief the ease and pleasure of our self-deceptions.
Recensement par la photographe parisienne Corinne MERCADIER:
“J'ai vu votre site et les photos que vous m'envoyez: j'y vois une étrange façon de passer au delà de la peau et de traiter la personne humaine comme poreuse au monde des éléments et des objets qui l'entourent. Ce qui est particulier, c'est que les images ne sont pas plaquées en surimpression, on a le sentiment d'une structure extérieure, une ossature en surface, fragile et parcellaire, qui laisse voir des fragments d'un noir intérieur. Quant à la préhistoire, vous en faites apparaitre les signes immémoriaux sur la peau-paroi unique de chacun. Comme si on portait en soi la capacité de retrouver la représentation que les hommes ont eu d'eux-mêmes avant de la nommer.”
septembre 2006
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