reviews I AM AS YOU WILL BE
i Am As You will Be:
the skeleton in Art
ChEIM & REAd, NEW YORk
20 SEptEMBER – 3 NOvEMBER
Only the best thematic exhibitions can hope to quickly
usher their viewers past the obviousness of superficial
conceits, just as it is the hope of their curators that
the show will launch devotees of the visual into
spirals of philosophical conundrum begetting robust,
humanist engagement. So it is with Xavier Tricot
curating I Am as You Will Be, yet another in a series
of museum-quality shows to which Cheim & Read
has dedicated itself recently. But though the show,
with its century-spanning array of artists’ renderings
of skulls and skeletons, points the way towards a land
well seeded with existentialism, the one overwhelming
and inescapable message of I Am as You Will Be is not,
as the show title suggests, that we must all confront
the inescapable fact of our mortality, but to wonder,
instead, about the fate of our teeth.
If this sounds strange, a bit of close attention
reveals that there are two kinds of work in this show:
those with teeth, and those without. And this is not
meant in any kind of metaphorical manner. I am
speaking of real, hard, sometimes pristine, sometimes
decayed, obdurate, aching teeth, much like the 50 laid
out on Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord Table (1994). Holzer’s
display is archaeological and criminological – these
bones belong to the players in a gruesome murder
– and so materialist. The teeth are arranged in a
single, well-organised line at the table’s edge, and the
arrangement offers nothing in the way of spirit; there
is no subject here – or if there is, it is not human, but
archival.
Contrast this with the large Indian-ink-on-
paper work by Jannis Kounelis (Untitled, 1980), whose
sweeping, gestural lines describe ethereal skulls with
hollow eyes and circular but notably empty mouths.
Think Munch’s Scream multiplied. Kounelis works the
lines of evocation, but with a seriousness that is less
eerie and more a childish ‘Boo!’ It’s after real affect,
but it’s all about the pleasure of the action rather than
the reality of a scare, much less a sense of dread. Tony
Matelli’s Sad Skulls (2003) occupy similar territory
here. Matelli’s pile of noggins have all of their teeth, but
once we see that their jawlines have been configured
into frowns, we’re back in the land of trick-or-treat.
Painstaking verisimilitude cannot counter the loss of that brute and discomfiting feeling that comes from seeing the
James Ensor, My Portrait
as a Skeleton, 1889,
awkward smile of a denuded mandible. And the more eidetic the representation, the further one seems to get from the etching, 12 x 8 cm.
possibility of meaning. Take Adam Fuss’s artist book, All (2007), which juxtaposes photographic prints of real skulls (drawn
Courtesy Cheim & Read,
New York
from daguerreotypes also included the exhibition) with foil-stamped tissue pages bearing ritualised words such as ‘life’, ‘tribute’
and ‘virtue’. Here each skull is nearly tautological: they simply are what they are, and the text is offered up as supplement (as
it always is with photography). Which, in the end, is the weakness of I Am as You Will Be: though much of the work is beyond
reproach, when a theme is (mis)taken for history, the ultimate impact lacks, well, bite. Jonathan T.D. Neil
137 Artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 137 5/11/07 12:31:41
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