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Stainless steel, mild steel,
wood, astra grass, dried bird.
Height 1.66m x width 4.8m x length
5.7m
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Exhibition; The Suter Art Gallery Nelson 10
August - 1 September 2002
...Older than flowers, older
than ferns, older than foraminifera and older
than
plasm altogether is the soul of the man underneath.
Lygia Clark
The series of influences
which indirectly and intuitively gave this work
shape were both personal and literary. Not the
least of these being Flann O'Brien's surrealistic
vision of eternity in The Third Policeman where
he questions; Why was Joe so disturbed at the
suggestion that he had a body? What if he had
a body? A body with another body inside it in
turn, thousands of such bodies within each other
like the skins of an onion, receding to some
unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a
link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings,
the world I knew merely the interior of the
being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or
what was the core and what monster in what world
was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing?
Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower
Down or were they brewing newly in me to be
transmitted Higher Up? And where O'Brien's alto
ego de Selby assures us that; Human existence
being an hallucination containing in itself
the secondary hallucinations of day and night
(the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere
due to the accretions of black air) it ill becomes
any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory
approach of the supreme hallucination known
as death. Lygia Clark also added her voice with
her poetic psychoanalytical - psychosomatic
references to body and performance in 'Writing
in Nostalgia of the Body' refers to '...The
mouth...making with its tongue from the caress
of the touch to the bite of rage..' ...How many
beings am I to always to be seeking from the
other being which inhabits my realities of contradictions...etc.
The earliest personal reference would be my
1960's work Slotzy Man and Slotzy Woman and
followed later by the 1970 work Arena
which was first exhibited with a companion piece
titled Community (Small triangular structures
surrounded by chopped strands of barbed wire).
These and other works were
based on my experience of face to face social
and cultural conflict in a state housing area
where each family seemed to be living in an
island of siege mentality meeting aggression
with aggression. In this sense the work was
autobiographical though it also referenced a
more general statement on human relations. (These
concerns later became the basis for the performance
work Contact
(1975)).
O'Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman.
London 1967. pp 102,103. bid. Frontispiece.
Lygia Clark. Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona,
1997. ibid. pp 185-212. 202. 341.
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