Marc Quinn

Prescription material; you are what you eat

Marc Quinn’s recent work negotiates an entire history of representations where the body is almost paradoxically re-embodied, where the timeless formulas of what we might call material integrity are tested, one body against another. As he casts the people whose stories speak through the limits of embodiment, the represented body sets itself against that for which it ‘stands in’. This is not mere substitution but rather resemblance achieved through an extension of the idea of the living body reiterated through the particular, essential, prescriptive nature of the materials used.

For Quinn the body and its mortality is often the site of sculpture. Indeed, the viewer, too, does not only understand the object through resemblance, but also through an idea of mass. Even when the object is abstracted beyond recognition, the route back towards it is defined by a negotiation of scale and mass – the viewer’s body set against the body observed. Under duress, the body comes to rework itself, redefine itself, remake itself, stand in for itself. It is not what is was, and yet, to all intents and purposes, it is identical to itself. The object becomes a figure of its own embodiment, as it were, where it speaks for itself, as if for another.

Any history of representations always has to begin with the eyes. The eyes that look and the eyes that do not see. This is the paradoxical impossibility of representing that agent of visuality. How, then, to represent the visible surface of the eye in three dimensions, without resorting to a two-dimensional mark on the surface? Engrave the eye? Or leave it blind? To the sculptor all eyes are as if blind.

The site of the blind eye in Quinn’s new work insists that there would be no such loss of integrity. When the eye cannot be represented as it might have been, leave it blind. Perhaps blindness in the Blind from Birth series operates in a dualism between visuality and materiality. The world as seen or unseen, and the world as perceived through embodied experience.

Yet there is no seeing here, since the referents have never been defined, except in terms of not seeing. Perhaps the blind might be said to understand the world in material terms rather than appearances. Seeing, of sorts, by means of a sense of mass. According to this reasoning, Anna Canning and Bill Waltier have to be cut from marble. These busts engage with a history that tends to generalisations of time. But here, as in much of Quinn’s recent work, the specifics of the body – the named body – become crucial. There is always something about proper names in Quinn’s work; transparent, referential, without fiction.

However accomplished the form, the artist is strategically detached from the process of handling. There are no signature marks on the surface; the work oscillates between the idealised and the particular, between the permanent and the transitory. The busts gesture towards generic type and a form of already-historicised perpetuity, but these named figures cannot be reduced to type. What makes these sculptures so alive is, paradoxically, their iridescent sense of mortality.

But blindness is just one configured trope in Quinn’s new work. Again, the body is always at stake – sensing, feeling, moving through the world – either through the synecdoche of the eyes or another form of substitution. Quinn’s Complete Marbles series (1999-2001) were the first works to suggest the possibility of a singular lack in the body and a solution to the impossibility of representation. He adopts the form of classical sculpture which, according to any modern experience, is all about missing parts, not by design but the vagaries of time. The idealised whole is literally disembodied, limb by precarious limb. Quinn sustains that familiarity and adopts it as an articulate mode of representing itself, becoming a perfect form through which to anticipate a lack.

While the carved body engages directly with classical precedent, the cast body, even in an adopted style or pose, is inherently of itself; a constructed other that reaffirms the presence of the person it seeks to imitate and to whom it is wholly indebted. Indebtedness, here, operates in several directions. In the history of representations there is always something owing to the notion of likeness or resemblance. There is always a debt to the body. But Quinn succeeds in reversing this upon itself, so that the body, too, is indebted to material for its ability to continue to represent itself, and to be representable.

The new sculptures continue Quinn’s quest for the unseen, underrepresented body. How to represent the ontology of the body, the body in depth, through a visual and tactile medium of surfaces?

Unlike earlier pieces such as the Alison Lapper sculptures, where our notion of normative beauty is reconfigured at the very surface of the exquisite object, here the sculpture appears to move inside of itself to seek a representation. It is no longer a question of surface, but substance. Innoscience, for example, takes the form of Quinn’s own child Lucas, cast in a mix of wax polymer and the very life-saving milk substitute that kept him alive. Here the surface is, apparently, not challenged at all. It looks much as it would were it cast or chiselled from more conventional materials. But just as Lucas could not exist without his synthetic milk substitutes so, too, the sculpture is dependent for its meaning upon the integration of the very same substance.

It might be argued, then, that the object relies upon discretely disseminated information – a wall label, or even this catalogue, for example – for any understanding of how the object works. But this would be to underestimate the presence of the object which, contrary to expectation, thrives on what we cannot see; something which we sense to be continuously, perpetually, present within itself.

This is sculpture’s ongoing obligation to its own materials, whether marble or animal blood or insulin, where the viewer encounters the work in a binary experience of representation and illusion together with matter and mass. That is, we know what the work resembles and, momentarily, suspend our knowledge of the materials with which it was made, only to be confounded less than a moment later by the awareness of the presence of the apparently inert object before us that is sustaining the illusion. The eye does not know where to look, and the body paces back and forth, trying to focus on the mass before it.

In the Chemical Life Support series, Quinn extends this interplay of form and content. The works are cast from wax mixed with the very substances on which each of the subjects depends to sustain life. Our understanding of these bodies is centred on technology’s attempt to keep change at bay. Again, the act of citation, of making the work stand in for the named body is central to the nature of these sculptures. The names need to be cited, in detail, at length. Carl Whittaker - Amiodarone, Aspirin, Neoral (Ciclosporin). Silvia Petretti - Sustiva, Tenofivir, 3TC. Nicholas Grogan – Insulin. Kate Hodgkison – Adcal-D 3, Folic Acid, Ferrous Sulphate, Methrotrexate, Plaquenil, Prednisolon.

The bodies depend upon chemical support because they are always in the process of foreclosing upon themselves. Silvia Peretti, for example, is HIV positive. The drugs she takes drugs literally offer resistance to her body’s failure to defend itself. The notion of an anti-body, here, is more than literal. It speaks of a body that, from within, needs to construct material for and of itself to sustain itself. Carl Whittaker takes drugs to prevent his body from rejecting transplanted organs. The organs resist integration, refusing to be embodied. The body is perpetually facing its own disconnectedness.

If foreknowledge of the drugs upon which each subject is dependent is one element of visual veracity, so the non-lapidary feel of the castings is as essential to our understanding of them. They could literally be melted down. Even if we did not know this, there would still be a sense of displacement and impermanence to the work. The figures do not stride or posture, but are rendered as horizontal, not simply in the passive mode of the reclining nude, but as something that resists an over-assertive embodied presence. The peaceful, unfettered bodies float, as if weightless, asleep, almost but never quite lifeless, above a plinth. The presentation diverges very subtly from the convention, defying gravity, challenging the impression of mass. Suspended animation; all signs of life, or all but.

Sculpture, then, is a constant interplay between the seeing and unseeing of itself. It is never quite what it appears to be, and our understanding is based on that visual instability. The materials employed by Quinn, here, are simultaneously literal and metaphorical. The body and its fabricated other now share similarities at a molecular level. The chemical intervention as it is prescribed prescribes for itself a modus vivendi. We can extrapolate a narrative for the body, we can speak of its weakness and its struggle through the world, by means of the chemicals brought to its defence.

A question emerges as to whether these chemicals become part of the person who relies upon them. Do they act as catalytic agents, passing through the body unchanged, or do they become bound up with the growth and what we might think of as the material truth of the body? Invasive and unnatural these substances act in the manner of a sort of prosthesis, so successfully that there can be no way to distinguish between the body and what extends its existence in the world. If Quinn’s new sculptures refuse to resolve that question either physically or ethically, they nevertheless mark the site where the debate must take place.

Quinn captures a stage between the body’s helplessness and the ineffaceable presence of embodiment. The body will not go away, however ailing. It will neither resolve nor absent itself; in life, in sculpture. Perhaps this might offer some explanation for the Cybernetically Engineered, Cloned Rabbits and the Mirror Paintings. The splayed rabbit form of the sculptures, rendered as gutted torso, takes on both the qualities of flesh exposed and the human body laid bare. The formal methodology of fabrication – computerised three-dimensional scans or clones of a disembowelled rabbit torso – gives the artist, deliberately at some remove, the ability to render the animal to human size or to a tiny version cast in silver.

Quinn extends the possibilities of what the animal can represent by rendering it both imponderably larger than life and infinitely smaller than imaginable, in a position that critiques the academy of the nude. The holy grail of the Human Genome Project, completed less the five years ago, suggests that the body can be infinitely reproduced through the information contained in its genetic material. The Rabbits enact the implications suggested by Quinn’s 2001 portrait of Sir John Sulston, director of the British end of the Human Genome Project. In this apparently abstract piece, single bacterial cells are grown into cultures, each containing the ‘sitter’s’ DNA. Perhaps one of the greatest anxieties of our time might be that the body, in all its uniqueness, might yet be infinitely reproducible.

Throughout the various incarnations of Quinn’s recent work, a unifying element must be the balance between the relative fragility of the body, its perpetual impending mortality, and a physical presence that cannot easily be discounted or absented. The Mirror Paintings begin with the symmetry of the body, as if it were always a mirror of itself. Consciously hand-painted into rich rainbows of colour, the visceral exposure is still about an uncomfortable encounter; a question of what to do with the body. There is a sense of the hand at work here, although not necessarily the artist’s own. The classical painterly medium of tempera on gesso does not obviate the continued concern with the materiality of the body, but is yet another route into the surface of the flesh, to the terrible beauty within.

These are images as if seen in a hall of mirrors. The multivalent beauty of the texture is all that is visible. There is no backwards step for perspective. We wander through this hall of mirrors, these agents of misperception, relishing the distortion, in order to define our body in terms of what it is not. Holding a mirror to ourselves we choose to unsee that physicality of the body, to evade its materiality in an act of suspended disbelief, somewhere towards an act of faith and continuity. The body despite itself.

Notes
1 Jacques Derrida’s exhibition and text for the Louvre in 1990, for example, addresses the idea of self-portraiture through the representation of blindness. See Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Andrew Renton is a writer and curator. He is director of the curatorial programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London

Andrew Renton
London, February 2005

First published in Marc Quinn, Exhibition Catalogue MART, Rome. Electra, Rome, 2006

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Bibliography
What Turns Something Into Something Else? by Darian Leader
The (In)complete Works of Marc Quinn by Rod Mengham

	Related Links
http://www.illuminationsmed... Eye Series of films by Illuminations
http://www.marcquinn.com/ Marc Quinn
http://www.london.gov.uk/fo... Fourth Plint
http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online
http://www.tate.org.uk/abou... Tate Online
http://www.groningermuseum.... Groninger Museum, Groningen

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