ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW
2013-10-28The basic principle, the Tartuffe principle, we can call it (Molière’s Tartuffe, but not only), endures through the ages and across cultures (Femens in every land, the job has still to be done!): “Cover that breast I cannot bear to see!” Sex, as we know, has a bad reputation.
When explicit it is terrible, dirty or nasty! So leave it to the pornographer and his vile deeds! When more suggestive, half-hearted (or through pursed lips, so to speak), it fares better with the upholders of good taste, but then of course it butters no parsnips. Not that artists have refrained from representing it, and sometimes in the most brutal fashion (from Courbet to Nauman, via Picasso, Man Ray, Molinier, Louise Bourgeois or Lebel), with or without “delectation” for the beholder, as Duchamp used to say. But clearly, like an artistic equivalent of the top shelf, it is clear that these pieces are “curiosities,” minor works even when major-format. Fémininmasculin, the exhibition conceived for the Pompidou Centre fifteen years ago by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Bernard Marcadé, showed, however, that sex was neither secondary nor scabrous, but intimately bound up (excuse the expression!) with the process of art itself.
That in fact it expressed more than it revealed through forms whose representation in itself is pretty much an open and shut case: that it cast light on creation from within, we might say. At the time, I regretted and was above all astonished that Alina Szapocznikow did not feature in what was and remains a milestone in the French approach to “gender.”
Exhibition runs through to December 7th, 2013
Galerie Loevenbruck
6, rue Jacques Callot
F – 75006 Paris
France
