Marc Quinn

The (In)complete Works of Marc Quinn

The prosthetic imagination is the most overworked faculty in the history of Western sensibility. The sculptural ideal has been transmitted through images of truncation; the perfection of classical modelling has been understood by means of a crude platonism; the viewers of the Venus de Milo, for example, project the unmaimed
original of the historical remnant. The title of Marc Quinn’s series ‘The Complete Marbles’ (1999-2001) in itself issues a challenge to preconceptions, since it contends that the dynamic relation between the presentation of the work and its reception supplements what is missing, projects a wholeness that is not dependent on merely visual or physical evidence.

The contemplation of a sculpture of one blind from birth (‘Mirror for the Blind: Anna Cannings’, 2005; ‘Mirror for the Blind: Bill Waltier’, 2005) helps the viewer to realize the necessity for reading its volume, material composition and reference to an individual history as well as, or perhaps before, its surface appearance.

A marble statue, no matter how finely rendered, is a cold, blockish substitute for the warm tissue it represents. It is the nature of the hard, smooth material, rather than its mass and the space it occupies, that enhances the disbelief we are otherwise willing to suspend in reading the likeness it gives promise of. We are acclimatized to marble as an alibi for flesh almost as completely as we take for granted the desirability of a physical symmetry that cannot be attained in nature. Marble has played an unique part in our cultural evolution. It was the selection pressure that enabled beauty of form to predominate over expression of function.

Perhaps the two most remarkable groups of figurative sculptures produced in Britain in recent years have appeared contradistinctive while being directly complementary. The biological fantasies of Jake and Dinos Chapman have included single and conjoined figures equipped with various supplementary organs that satirise the prosthetic impulse in Western attitudes towards the human form. The sculptural portraits of Marc Quinn have arrested that impulse by the provision of living referents for the aesthetic reception of body parts and incomplete torsos. Their candidness is both physical and conceptual, a reflection not simply of carving and polishing but also of documentary adequacy. The Chapman brothers are indebted to the traditions of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, with their emphasis on the body as a system of appetites, caught up in a perpetual transaction with the material world through a variety of forms of ingestion and expulsion. Marc Quinn has subverted the alternative tradition, that of the self-contained classical body, literal embodiment of the will to order, monumentally asphyxiated by the thin air of the ideal.

His uncanny simulation of a hyper-classical perfection nonetheless involves a kind of displacement of the artist from tradition, since the actual carving is performed by Italian stonemasons, working from casts provided by Quinn. The artist’s removal from the final stage of fabrication seems to locate his primary responsibility in this act of casting. The cast is the medium in which the classical tradition was most often experienced before changes in museum practice during the twentieth century. Several major galleries still retain at least one room crowded with nineteenth century casts.

The Victorian enthusiasm for plaster was not confined to preserving the remains of antiquity, but was equally vigorous in its desire to cast from the life. The three-dimensional freeze-frame that captured the vital statistics of an unrepeatable individual was especially popular during an era that embraced the capacity for the mass-production of the work of art. This paradox is central to the composition of ‘The Complete Marbles’, since the mechanical fidelity of the cast is succeeded by the necessary adaptations of the individual craftsman. The issue is resumed in twenty first century form by the implications of cloning, for art no less than for medical ethics. Casting is an integral component in some of the most eloquent and authoritative artworks of the last two decades, ranging from the congestion of architectural space in the work of Rachel Whiteread to the engorging of bodily forms, especially in the recent and current projects of Marc Quinn.

Genetic Sculpting
The remarkable impact of Quinn’s work inheres partly in the organizing paradox at the centre of his activity: he is an experimental, conceptual artist whose work is almost exclusively figurative. His working within the parameters of figuration seems to ensure the readability of individual sculptures, although these always turn out to be operating to a greater or lesser degree at subtextual levels. The enhanced legibility of the human form has enabled Quinn to enter the art world, and the art market, and to re-enter periodically the atmosphere of critical reception, with a series of coups d’oeil. The first such intervention was the presentation of ‘Self’ at the Sensation exhibition in 1991; this mould of Quinn’s head, filled with nine pints of his own blood, was both visually stunning and psychosomatically unsettling. It was echoed in 2002 by the portrait of the artist’s son, Lucas, which used a mould of the child’s head as a container for his own placenta. Equally as dramatic was the use in 2004 of the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square for a scaled-up version of one of Quinn’s marble studies of Alison Lapper, the disabled artist with no arms and unusually shortened legs. But in many ways the most provoking assault on audience expectations came from Quinn’s decision to install his most celebrated non-figurative work, ‘A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Sulston’ (2001) in a gallery dedicated entirely to figuration, the National Portrait Gallery.

This visually muted composition bears no immediate resemblance to its subject, but is nevertheless a portrait in a true sense, since it consists of several strands of DNA in agar jelly. It represents the identity of an individual not through attention to visible signs of character, or to social and cultural markers, but in terms of basic cellular
structure. In this it is a more authentic representation than examples of a figurative tradition which rely on conventions of interpretation frequently discredited. There is no guaranteed way of reading a face or body, since interpretative codes are subject to historical change. Quinn’s change of focus is in line with our growing awareness of the extent to which micro-structural and macro-structural pressures on the formation of the self are of no less significance than factors of race, nationality, gender, class and age. Sulston’s genetic signature is both an index of uniqueness and a reminder of the overwhelming degree of physiological overlap between all humans. Quinn’s related work ‘DNA Garden’ (2002) includes among its bacteria colonies seventy five examples of different plant species and two of different humans, extending still further the basis for identification of the self by emphasizing the broadly genetic similarity between humanity and other forms of life.

The extraction of Sir John Sulston’s DNA is in itself a cultural marker of his claim to celebrity as the inspiration behind the Human Genome Project. But the mirroring by art of a scientific procedure is an appropriate gesture during an era in which both discourses and activities have been drawn towards the philosophical and ethical status of the replica. We are still possessed of the Romantic conception of the artist as original genius whose works acquire value in proportion to their uniqueness, despite the development of mechanical means of reproduction which flood the market with exact copies. When the relation between replica and point of origin is questioned, identity is diluted and value is undermined. If the extraction of DNA is the first step towards cloning, then Quinn’s artwork appears to reverse the usual relation between original and replica, since his portrait is a kind of vertical petri dish conserving the means with which to cultivate a new original. There is an analogy here with the function of simulacra in contemporary culture, whereby constructions of the self are influenced by models circulating in the media that do not refer back to actual, lived existences as much as to day-dreams of what people would like to be. Crucial in fuelling the circulation of these models is the value invested in celebrity. Quinn’s study of replication resembles a living reliquary; by placing it in a shrine of celebrity, the National Portrait Gallery, he is arguing for the total nature of our contemporary fascination with the re-composing of the self, in a process that has reached critical mass as a part of our cultural evolution.

The Nature of Artifice
‘Garden’ (2000) mounts a challenge to evolutionary theory, in a spirit equivalent to that of the touring exhibitions of so-called ‘happy families’ so popular in Victorian Britain. Cages were filled with a variety of birds and animals, deliberately mixing predators and prey. The point of the exhibition was to demonstrate the untroubled juxtaposition of creatures that would normally be in fierce competition in a natural
setting. The peaceful coexistence of these blatantly incompatible species appeared to defy the understanding of nature in terms of constant rivalry and victimization. But, of course, the point was lost without tacit confirmation that nature really was ‘red in tooth and claw’, and that evolution was a narrative of power struggles. Quinn’s ‘Garden’ conveys a similar effect, but without the crass showmanship. Plants from a range of diverse habitats are introduced into the same environment without adverse reaction. This adaptation is primarily a revision of the conventions of the traditional still life that assembles a medley of dead animals and freshly cut flowers; Quinn’s
refinement occupies the interval between life and death, between the incipient decay of the nature morte and the false vitality of the ‘happy family’. This interval is the limbo of suspended animation, of cryogenic removal from the effects of passing time. The vividness of the colours and the resilience of form are entirely dependent on refrigeration. If this control over organic process, this retarding of the gradual but inevitable fact of degeneration, seems unduly artificial, then its reliance on technology is nothing less than a sign of its complete assimilation to the ever changing conditions of evolution. As Quinn’s work keeps on showing, with an increasing versatility, the evolution of humanity has been in symbiosis with the machine; for both good and ill, the prosthesis is second nature. Perhaps the most complex issue that arises from the technologizing of human biology is the question of agency, of the balance between active and passive, voluntary and involuntary, in the scope of humanity’s involvement in the process.

Closely associated with the Edenic removal from history that Quinn achieves through freezing his specimens, are the several paintings of ‘impossible’ gardens making use of specially developed ‘permanent’ pigments that will fade at a fraction of the rate of conventional paint. The natural history of art is a record of the gradual disappearance of colour. It is appropriate that Quinn’s most ambitious work in this genre, ‘The Overwhelming World of Desire’, an enormous representation of the orchid variety Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill, should have been erected high on the South Downs at the Goodwood Sculpture Park. The Downs make an ideal habitat for various natural varieties of orchid: the Early Purple, the Pyramidal, the Lesser Spotted. These are all attracted to the thin soils, the paucity of rich nutrients, the relative lack of competition from other species. The point about the Winston Churchill is that it is an artificial hybrid, a contrivance whose real habitat is the imagination of its creator. In plant-breeding, as in sculpture, the fake is often the real thing. This is spectacularly the case in the world of orchids, where the artificial varieties outnumber the natural by about six to one. What this suggests is that humanity has taken over the orchid and changed its character. But the opposite might be the case. The fact is, the orchid has been phenomenally successful in evolutionary terms. It is one of the earth’s oldest flowering plants, and its astonishing popularity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might be a reflection of its ability to attract and employ ever more efficient pollinators: once, the desires of insects, now, the desires of humans, are under its control.

This ambiguity affects the way we react to the size of Quinn’s sculpture—it is no less than 12 metres high. Standing among ash trees and rivalling them in height, ‘The Overwhelming World of Desire’ looks Jurassic both in dimensions and in its aggressive colours. This could be the result of braggadocio on Marc Quinn’s part, or
it could be proportionate to the balance of power between humanity and a plant which so brilliantly utililizes human desires, often in an alarmingly direct fashion. Quinn’s plant has disturbing echoes of several human sexual characteristics, including a vast yellow tongue emerging from a red cup fringed with dark hairs. The flatness of this gigantic cut-out in stainless steel belies the fundamental complexity of response it urges on the viewer.

Life Class
Quinn’s major publication, Incarnation (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998) includes two photographs of macchine anatomiche in the Capella Sansevero in Naples. These are skeletons festooned with hundreds of ramifying blood vessels reproduced in the form of delicate metal tracery. The veins have been cast by means of pouring hot metal into the arterial system and then allowing it to cool. Each macchina has been placed inside a gilded frame as an example of the anatomist’s ‘art’, and is displayed in the company of paintings and sculptures in more conventional media. The method and materials clearly anticipate Quinn’s use of blood and other bodily fluids in his representations of the self, especially in the first half of his career. The stripping away of the body’s outer coverings, the focus on underlying substance and structure, form part of a gesture towards universality, both by echoing the motifs of the memento mori tradition, and by emphasizing materials that can be exchanged, transfused, transplanted, without apparent loss of individuality.

The recent face transplant at Amiens in France raises questions about the extent to which identity is invested in corporeality precisely because it involves a grafting of surface details. But the Capella Sansevero houses other artefacts of equal significance for the understanding of Quinn’s practice. Far more numerous, and in their different way equally as engrossing, are the examples of eighteenth century Neapolitan sculpture epitomised by Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Il Cristo Velato [The Veiled Christ]. Commentators on The Complete Marbles, and on Quinn’s more recent series, Chemical Life Support, have referred to the work of Antonio Canova as a basis for comparison with the British sculptor’s evident desire for an almost glacial flawlessness, for embodying his figures inside an exquisitely impermeable membrane.

But Canova himself sought to emulate Sanmartino, whose Il Cristo Velato he wanted to buy. This extraordinary composition shows the body of Christ covered entirely with the representation of a veil so fine as to appear diaphanous. Its airy lightness has a profoundly ambivalent effect, accentuating the contours of the underlying figure but functioning also as a metaphor for the provisional nature of physical existence. It seems to suggest that the skin itself is no more than a veil, that the concerns of the individual are no more that a superficial wrapping around the more fundamental reality of a common condition and a common fate. Quinn’s recent sculptures in marble and polymer wax have achieved a similar resonance.

Both materials seem to absorb light, especially the polymer wax, whose slightly translucent quality resists the play of light and shade and blanches out the record of individuating detail. The surfaces of these immaculate bodies lack any visual basis for differentiation, returning an effect of uniformity to the viewer’s gaze. Although clearly derived from information about age, gender and medical history that makes their subjects unrepeatable in all kinds of ways, the sculptures themselves are unnervingly generic. Twentieth century sculpture showed extensive engagement with ideas about the standardization of humanity, but mostly in terms of the social and
political pressures for uniformity. One of the founding texts of this tradition of thinking about modernity was Heinrich von Kleist’s Treatise on Marionettes, echoed in Bruno Schulz’s Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies. The mannequin became the vehicle for representations of loss of agency, alienation, replaceability, and was particularly evident in Eastern European art, in the work of Tadeusz Kantor, for example, and of Miroslaw Balka. A western variant can be seen in the photogenic exactitude of Robert Gober’s wax models, whose hyperrealism renders particularly disturbing their disclosure of estrangement within the everyday. But Quinn’s twenty first century meditations reconfigure the lines of stress between individual and collective identities.

The scope of his work is marked out by attention to the opposing perspectives of species awareness and microbiological fingerprinting. From one perspective, individual divergence from type is virtually infinitesimal, while from the other, the self is a meeting place for chemical reactions that have no exact parallel. The
fundamental axiom of Chemical Life Support is that each sculpture should be created using the precise combination of elements found in the body of the named subject.

The chemical composition of each sculpture is precisely unique, despite the uniformity of finish and tone. It is these hidden differences that ensure the survival of those being portrayed, while also allowing them to pass as unremarkable, the same as anyone else. Quinn has deepened the sense of paradox that governs the viewer’s experience of his work by posing his subjects in ways that make them available for inspection while hinting at obliviousness; they are undeniably exposed but also self-communing. Undoubtedly, the most troubling visual element of the sculptures is their horizontal posture. The bodies are not subject to gravity. Although they rest on plinths, there is no physiological rationale to the elevation of limbs or the way that relaxed muscles appear to resist the pressure of body weight. This makes them seem unfettered and free-floating, but also vulnerable; unconscious or lost in reverie, they have substituted pharmaceutical for umbilical dependence. Although relying on medical science to build their lives, they are constructed no less movingly by the perceptions and attitudes of those who surround them.

Exquisite Corpses
There is a genuine complexity to the growth of Quinn’s oeuvre, whereby every apparent diversion into new techniques, forms or subject matter ends up contributing to a resumption of many of the same themes and ongoing concerns. To track the succession of projects is to see an accumulation of weight behind the meditation on completeness and incompleteness, surface and depth, originality and imitation, nature and artifice, the animate and the inanimate. It seems entirely appropriate that the latest phase of this development should itself be concerned with the logic of the return. The bronze sculptures derived from casts of frozen animal carcases struggle with the invasion of meanings that assail them from the history of art. But the viewer’s attempt to stabilize the meaning of each work through the context of tradition makes them complicit with a violent wrenching of the abject into contact with the desirable, and of meat into contact with spirit. Quinn’s Flesh series, shown as a group at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2004, is firmly in the tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text that consolidated, if it did not actually inaugurate, the prehistory of artistic speculation about the relation between the material and the immaterial. The imagining through myth of the coexistence of spirit and flesh produced a congeries of scenarios in which various gods inhabited the physical forms of animals, birds and trees. The secular extension of this tradition endowed the same objects with a metaphorical freight of qualities recognizably human rather than divine. This anthropomorphizing of nature had become so routinized by the mid-nineteenth century that Ruskin would complain bitterly in Modern Painters of how the spread of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ was almost beyond recall. And yet the bronze menagerie of Marc Quinn embraces the dilemma with a constantly renewed strength of purpose.

The butchering, manipulating, freezing and casting has not removed a sense of alien existence despite the very human persistence that is seen willing these animal remnants into their choreographed afterlife. The viewer cannot ignore the art historical matrix from which these gestures of reclining, cradling and balancing have
been taken. And yet to accede to the invitation of these echoes is to connive at a form of appropriation that turns these pivotal tableaux into spectacles of power. If The Complete Marbles plays on the subtle insinuation of criteria of selection and rejection that relegate the value of lives lived without conventional abilities, the Flesh sculptures advertise the use of sheer force. Thus, the ‘Mother and Child (Lamb and Rabbit)’(2004) seem grotesquely abandoned by the compassion that is ordinarily correlative with this prototype of care and tenderness. ‘Standing Figure (Rabbit)’(2003) proposes, quite astonishingly, a relationship with Rodin’s portrait of Balzac, whose authorship of La Comedie Humaine—deliberately contrasted with the title of Dante’s epic La Divina Commedia—emphasized flesh rather than spirit. Quinn’s rabbit is made to emulate the earlier statue’s monumental posture, suggesting the undeniable weightiness of Balzac’s analysis of the weaknesses and failings of humanity. And yet its greatly magnified scale only serves to underline its own vulnerability, its incongruency as shadow to an icon of cultural authority. The extraordinary energy bound up in the original networks of muscle and sinew seems to emerge in bronze as a form of resistance to the unnatural constraint reproduced for symbolic purposes by the artist’s exertions of stretching, compressing and wrestling meat into shape. It is precisely that resistance which imbues these tortured figures with nobility, despite their conscription in a parody of heroic form that is exclusively human in conception. Quinn is attuned to the various grounds of humanity’s symbiosis with an environment whose increasingly technologized character makes it ever easier for the non-human to be placed at humanity’s disposal. If the themes of his art are the perennials of art history, they are also urgently topical, not least in judging that humanity’s intrumentalization of nature has already gone beyond crisis-point.

Quinn’s most recent sculpture, his enigmatic portrait of Kate Moss, ‘Kate Moss, Sphinx’ (2006) is an intriguingly hybrid work. It distils the fascination with celebrity as stimulus for replication, while relaying the artist’s virtual obsession with the unimpaired surfaces of classical statuary. At the same time, its dramatic configuration of limbs is not very far removed from the torsion with which the animal forms of the Flesh series have been stripped of their self-possession. The flamboyant equilibrium of the yoga-like pose suggests an extreme degree of self-control, and yet the specific combination of angles recalls the energetic restraint of the ‘Laocoon’.

Moss seems almost to be wrestling with her own body, struggling to break free from the limitations imposed by fashion. Lessing’s famous essay on the classical ensemble of figures emphasized its qualified expression of pain, using it to illustrate the nature of the divergence between poetry and the visual arts; unlike poetry, sculpture was unable to represent the experience of time. And yet Quinn’s complex figure captures precisely a moment during the transfer of energy that conjures up a clear impression of the physical movements that must have preceded it, no less than those that will follow it. Strangely akin to the vitrines that rely on freezing,
Quinn’s latest composition renders the turbulence underlying the static condition of sculpture. It is as if all his works come equipped with a conceptual lever, by means of which three-dimensional objects in space are guided into a fourth dimension of history, tradition and the cumulative changes of evolution.

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College.

First published in Marc Quinn, Exhibition Catalogue Groninger Museum, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2006

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