Sunday, 26 November 2000
I've given up imagining what Young British Artists are going to be like before I meet them - like their work, they invariably surprise in the flesh. Yet if any one should seem familiar it is Marc Quinn, who has consistently used his own body in his work. A cast of his head filled with eight pints of his own blood (the average amount in the human body) titled Self and first made in 1991, caused fainting fits when exhibited at the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show in 1997.
I've given up imagining what Young British Artists are going to be like before I meet them - like their work, they invariably surprise in the flesh. Yet if any one should seem familiar it is Marc Quinn, who has consistently used his own body in his work. A cast of his head filled with eight pints of his own blood (the average amount in the human body) titled Self and first made in 1991, caused fainting fits when exhibited at the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show in 1997.
Quinn is the original and, some say, the best Young British Artist. Born in 1964, he studied History and History of Art at Cambridge University. Aged 24, he was the first artist shown by YBA impresario Jay Jopling and when Self was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 1993 the Evening Standard described Quinn as "London's most talked about young artist".
However, instead of the ruthless individual you might expect from his visceral work, Quinn is dapper - dressed in shiny shoes, designer felt trousers and crisp white textured shirt - gentle and almost cuddly. Like his fellow YBAs of the Saatchi years, he is extremely self-knowing and over-flows with ideas yet, unlike them, he has renounced their trademark hard living.
Quinn was in the grip of full-blown alcoholism when Self was shown at the Saatchi Gallery. "I was unable to capitalise on the publicity because my personal life was in such chaos," he recalls. "I had to sort that out to get to work." Quinn's struggle with addiction has been imprinted on him since then: "When I stopped drinking I became aware that it was all about living in this continuous present and it ends because that's not possible."
In 1995 Quinn showed Emotional Detox: The Seven Deadly Sins at the Tate. Made of toxic lead and cast from his own body, the sculptures explicitly express his internal agony - Quinn describes them as his most autobiographical work. "I still do Alcoholics Anonymous ... It keeps your feet on the ground; you remember the reality of [alcoholism]." In the last couple of years, he has moved on to create a new body of work which goes on show at White Cube2 this week (and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in January), and features in a South Bank Show next month.
"Giving up drinking has given me an enormous lust for life," explains Quinn. "Addiction is like a broken record, you just keep repeating the same thing: you can see what you're doing but you're caught in a vicious circle ... Now I've stopped using myself in my work because I got bored and wanted to give it a rest, that's why I'm doing sculptures of other people, flowers and abstract work."
Earlier this year Quinn undertook his most ambitious project yet, Garden, a walk-in steel chamber containing a tank lined with luscious flowers that are frozen in 25 tons of chilled silicon. "What I love about my flower sculptures is that they seem untransformed, it's almost a parallel reality," he says. "You've got this paradox because when they're dead - frozen in silicone - they seem to be alive and perfect, but it's only if the power is turned off and they start petrifying that they're actually alive again. These beautiful flowers are really about death."
Like Self and many of Quinn's sculptures, the survival of Garden relies upon maintaining an extremely specific temperature and condition. White Cube2 will show Reincarnate (1999), a vase cast in the artist's blood with an orchid at its centre, while a vase of flowers also frozen in silicon, Eternal Spring (red) of 1988, is part of the Hayward Gallery's current "Spectacular Bodies" exhibition.
"All the frozen sculptures are about dependence," comments Quinn. "They're so demanding technically, they drive you and the person who owns the work completely insane. But beauty has its own reason, and once you put the flowers in you'll forgive the sculptures anything. There's a kind of madness to it which is part of the meaning of the work: the inappropriate amount of effort which in a way is what life is about - they can only exist in our kind of society."
Garden is stored at the Prada Foundation in Milan, but White Cube2 will show Quinn's large paintings of the work made using a Thirties photographic technique which incorporates the hallucinogenic colours of permanent car pigments. "The paintings refreeze the garden in another way," argues Quinn. "Because they're of real flowers they tend to seduce you into thinking it's a real place, then you realise that an orchid is next to an artichoke and so completely unnatural. They're beautiful but also rather nauseating. Like eating a million sweets, you get this intense desire and then you want to throw up. As with Dorian Gray, the idea is that if you look at something perfect, then there's got to be something imperfect, and that imperfection is you."
While working on Garden, Quinn began a series of life-size models of amputees - those who have lost or were born without limbs. Inspired by the lost limbs of classical sculptures, Quinn made casts of his subject's bodies then passed them to an Italian workshop to be sculpted in marble. Next year, his eight sculptures, a group portrait made between 1999-2000, will stand next to Canova's Three Graces at the Victoria & Albert Museum; White Cube2 will show a sculpture of a disabled woman eight months pregnant, and one with her able-bodied baby.
How does Garden relate to these sculptures? "I like paradoxes," answers Quinn. "Beauty is an amazing thing that you can use to get under people's skins, to deliver a missile. These marble sculptures are incredibly beautiful, but they're also about a challenging subject. People are seduced by the beauty of the sculpture, and that makes them face something that they can normally avoid."
Quinn will also show his own DNA in a test-tube, extracted from his sperm and preserved in alcohol: there is no avoiding addiction in Quinn or his work. "Substance abuse is about abstracting yourself from the real world, about stopping time, and all the themes of my work are there," he explains. "You kind of die and are reborn each day, every morning is Genesis and every night is Revelation. If you're aware of all these things then you love life all the more: that's partly why I use beauty, it's so egalitarian, yet it also has another level if you want to find it."
'Still Life': White Cube2, N1 (020 7930 5373), Friday to 6 January, 2001; 'Give and Take': Serpentine Gallery, W2 and Victoria & Albert, SW7 (020 7298 1515), 30 January to 1 April; 'South Bank Show': 17 December, ITV, 10.45pm
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