At the age of 37, Marc Quinn has recently become a father. It is this
transition into fatherhood, perhaps, that has prompted a significant shift
in the emphasis of the work included in the Tate Liverpool exhibition that
opens on 1 February.
Despite his long-term association with fellow White Cube artists, as a
Cambridge history of art graduate Quinn has always stood apart from those of
his contemporaries whose path to recognition was via Goldsmiths and Freeze.
To date, his work has been largely concerned with the fragility of his own
corporeal being. Predominant among the early work was Self, the now infamous
self-portrait head cast by freezing eight pints of his own blood, a work
that became an iconic image in the early nineties following its first
showing at Jay Jopling’s fledgling gallery in 1991.
On the basis of a recent conversation with the artist, and on the
preparations I was shown for the show, I can reveal that the Tate Liverpool
exhibition will demonstrate a discernible shift from Quinn’s earlier
preoccupation with ‘self’ to concerns that address the ‘other’, the
culmination of a gradual transition that has taken place in his work since
the South London Gallery showing three years ago. Quinn claims to have
become all too aware of the limitations of foregrounding his own body as the
singular generative means of departure and now acknowledges the need for an
added component, a move outward from the ‘self’ towards those around him.
This said, there remain many familiar references, most notably the use of
‘hidden mechanisms’ – silicon, glycol, electricity supply – all of which are
necessary for maintaining the arrested state of life apparent in so many of
his works. Quinn’s art also continues to possess a sense of the dilemmas of
self-generation, the fragile balance between the eschatological battle and
sustained routines of daily life, represented scatologically through the use
of his own blood and excrement to achieve what Kristeva lucidly calls ‘that
secular “filth”, which becomes sacred “defilement”’.
In the wake of fatherhood, however, Quinn’s impulse has been to move away
from the repeated use of the abject per se towards issues addressing the
duality between reproductive life and the inescapable imminence of death. As
George Bataille observed: ‘Death is really the opposite process to the
process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled’.
In discussing this apparent change of emphasis, Quinn told me that he
believes his work has ‘gone out into the world. Much of the early work –
even though it was based on myself – was actually something I wanted to
stand in for anyone. Unfortunately it got interpreted as being about me. So,
in order to make things clearer – and because
I was bored with doing things about myself – I broadened
it out.’
The exhibition begins with the ubiquitous Quinn cabinet
– the twin to that which holds his own blood-head – here containing a frozen
representation of his son Lucas’ head made, within a week of the birth, from
the child’s placenta. This is the centre-piece of a reconstructed studio
showing drawings, gouaches, and photographs, designed to simulate the
artist’s working context. One photograph appearing later in the show depicts
baby Lucas and the artist’s grandmother, elucidating the 96-year age gap
between the two and implying a Viola-like narrative of life simultaneously
concluding and beginning.
Similar concerns are picked up in two white marble sculptures of Alison
Lapper with her son Parys, where the mother is represented both pregnant and
shortly after giving birth. These works are an extension of the carved
marble series of amputees and others with physical anomalies executed in
1999-2000, which included the limbless Peter Hull figure featured in Quinn’s
most recent exhibition at White Cube. Alison Lapper was born without fully
developed limbs. Her portraits not only challenge us in terms of the
familiar canons of beauty associated with the clichés of carved marble, but
force us to confront our aesthetic prejudices vis à vis physical deformity.
However, in contrast to our expectations, they evoke the transcendent beauty
of mother and child, a sense of inner human completeness confronting the
incompleteness of her physical body. These two works also raise the issue of
life born of death, a theme more usually exemplified by the funereal and
comme- morative use of marble, and taking us back to the origins of sculpture
itself.
Quinn claims that there are ‘social issues in these marble sculptures’, that
they are about ‘taking what is socially seen as an unacceptable body, or
even a destroyed body, and celebrating it as a whole person’. The
representations of Alison Lapper and her baby touch upon such issues ‘but
not in an agit-prop way. More importantly, these works are about inside and
outside, and the difference between the two. When Peter Hull closes his eyes
he feels as whole as you or I.’
Like Rodin and Canova before him, Quinn works with plaster, the actual
carving being executed by specialist craftsmen in Italy. The reference to
Rodin is elsewhere reiterated in a reworking of what is arguably Rodin’s
most famous work, The Kiss, Quinn’s version again featuring an embrace
between two physically disabled lovers.
Ideas of the family find reference in Quinn’s interest in classification,
typology and taxonomy. This interest first emerged in his genomic portrait
featuring the DNA profile of the eminent geneticist, Sir John Sulston, shown
at the National Portrait Gallery, London, last September. In the Tate
Liverpool installation, Quinn extends a similar approach to himself, his
partner, his partner’s child, and his son Lucas, even though the resulting
‘portrait’ blurs the sense of family and makes opaque their ‘relatedness’.
The theme reappears in DNA Garden (2002) where a grid-like presentation displays two human (male and female) and seventy-five
plant DNA profiles, although the distinction between human and plant is
deliberately obscured. Within this strange confusion of Mendelism and
Darwinism, Quinn intentionally problematises the origin of our species,
suggesting that prior to their bifurcation in some almost inconceivably
distant past these differing DNA strands – plant and human
– shared a common point of departure. The juxtaposition of DNA Garden with a
test tube containing a strand of Quinn’s own DNA, Self Conscious (2000),
merely exaggerates the uncertainty of those origins, while, in a cryogenic
state of preserved beauty, a cabinet of Arum lilies raises further
iconographic references to the Annunciation and universal human incarnation.
Our origins in some mythic Eden are intentionally placed in
contradistinction to our supposed evolutionary beginnings. This uneasy
conjunction is elaborated by Quinn’s recent pigment transfer images derived
from colour photographs of a pseudo-genetic flower installation which Quinn
realised for the Prada Foundation, Milan, in 2000. In this extraordinary
polychromy of provocative flowers, Quinn quite literally created an
imaginary Garden of Eden, composed of the most exotic examples selected from
a flower encyclopaedia. These flowers, which could not conceivably co-exist
in the natural world, existed only in Quinn’s Garden itself, where a large
glass vitrine kept the blooms in an arrested state of perfection.
Aside from the extended shelf-life of the pigment transfer process – giving
photographs a survival rate closer to paintings
– there is also the desire to place them in the space between photography
and painting, the in-betweenness to which much of Quinn’s work aspires.
Moreover, the computer pigment transfer is not that far removed from the
air-brush technique of Photorealism. This idea is developed further in
Liverpool where Quinn has overpainted some of these transfer paintings in
white, adding random letraset numbers to the blanked-out spaces à la Jasper
Johns. Or is this perhaps a deliberate reversal and randomising of the
Warhol project of ‘painting by numbers’?
The last major room of the exhibition presents something of a catalogue raisonné of earlier work, including examples of Quinn’s body cast series, No
Visible Means of Escape; one of the Planck density works; one of his
glass-quicksilver works, Etymology of Morphology; and a single Shit
painting. A more neo-conceptual departure is also to be found in this room,
where Quinn has installed a mirror into which he has looked every day for a
year. Is this, I asked, an artistic joke on the Romantic-Enlightenment idea
of a mirror containing the memories of all those that have looked into it?
Quinn’s reply harks back to the old Berkeley chestnut: ‘I think when you
walk away, the tree is still there’. Quinn, of course, is a trained art
historian and is very accomplished within its practice and remit. ‘I think
what’s interesting about history is that everyone sees the present through
the screens of the past. If you are not aware of the screens you are looking
through, then you just do not know what you are looking at. I think what is
interesting about the history of art is that it gives you a little more
self-consciousness in what you are doing.’
In many ways the very last work is this exhibition perfectly illustrates the
circular character of Quinn’s concerns about life being shaped by death and
renaissance. This – at the time of writing – still unnamed work comprises a
twenty-litre laboratory flask containing a remarkable flower called the stapelia. The stapelia has the unusual characteristic of appearing to
passing insects as if it were carrion. But it is not a predatory flower; it
merely attracts insects in order to propagate. That is to say, the
simulacrum of putrefaction is necessary in order for the flower to
regenerate itself.
Having now reached the end of the exhibition, it is at this point we
discover that Quinn intends for us to retrace our steps and exit at the
point where we entered. We must thus journey from new life – his son Lucas’
head and the studio room – to death and putrefaction, and then back again to
life and regeneration. This alone ought to tell us that Quinn walks a
tightrope, attempting both to utilise and express a universal human
condition in an age where universals are seen by many as no longer tenable.
He might almost be read as a post-transgressive romantic-heroic artist who
increasingly reflects an exemplary virtue still at work in the humanist
project, albeit articulated through alternative scatological and abject
hierarchies. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly reverential in the
art of Marc Quinn. As Bataille proposed concerning the sacred and the
profane: ‘What is sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror
that I have spoken of, a fetid sticky object without boundaries, which teems
with life and yet is the sign of death. It is nature at the point where its
effervescence closely joins life and death, where it is death disgorging
life with decomposed substance.’
Marc
Quinn is at Tate Liverpool, 1 February – 21 April 2002
www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Mark Gisbourne is a critic and art historian